“Trimming $350 Million from a $16 billion state budget is small potatoes, not the sky falling. If anything, our federal and state governments should be focused on eliminating even more spending to protect taxpayers.”
I had to laugh when I read Justin Ailport’s hyperbolic column last month calling Gov. Greg Gianforte’s recent vetoes of proposed spending in the new state budget a “cruel” “slashing and hacking” to “serve his rich buddies”. It reminded me of a recent editorial cartoon which nails the absurdity of America’s fiscal debate. In the cartoon, an elephant, representing the Republican Party, calmly trims a tiny branch from a tree labeled “Govt. Spending”, while a hysterical donkey—standing for Democrats—screams, “We’re all gonna die!”
The cartoon’s satire skewers the donkey’s overreaction, and it’s spot-on. The U.S. fiscal situation is dire, and the elephant’s cautious snip isn’t close to enough. Our nation’s fiscal “tree” isn’t just overgrown; its roots are rotting, and the donkey’s panic over minor spending cuts is a distraction from the real threat: our $37 trillion national debt, the largest spending problem of any government in history. And while Montana’s fiscal house is in much better shape, it too requires constant prudence to keep things in check. Trimming $350 Million from a $16 billion state budget is small potatoes, not the sky falling. If anything, our federal and state governments should be focused on eliminating even more spending to protect taxpayers.
To their credit, Congress did recently pass some modest trims to spending. The “Big Beautiful Bill” paired pro-growth tax cuts with $1.4 trillion in savings over the next ten years, mostly attributable to changes that help slow the rate of growth for Medicaid and SNAP by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in those programs. And Congress’s “rescission package” locked in around $9 billion in cuts to wasteful spending identified by Elon Musk’s DOGE related to public broadcasting and foreign aid. All four members of Montana’s federal delegation voted in favor of these proposals.
The savings here represent a drop in the bucket of the federal government’s spending, but it triggered an absolute meltdown in some Montana circles.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” achieved some Medicaid savings by restricting funding for states providing Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants and requiring that able-bodied adults on Medicaid complete 20 hours of work, education or volunteering each week to remain eligible. While backers in Congress contend this move strengthens Medicaid’s ability to serve the truly needy and root out waste and abuse in the program, a former candidate for Montana Governor tweeted that the bill’s changes would “literally kill Americans”.
The “rescission package” delivers most of its $9 billion in savings by eliminating wasteful foreign aid slush funds spent on things like DEI musicals in Ireland, Moroccan pottery classes, Iraqi Sesame Street, transgender clinics in India, and more. One Montana political party leader responded with a column seriously claiming that cancelling this spending will cause 14 million people to die.
Crying wolf like this over even the most minor federal spending reductions calls into question the sincerity of outrage from political operatives towards vetoed state spending. When practically any single dollar cut from government is billed either as a crisis or the result of a sinister plot, it starts to appear more as politically self-interested rhetoric than truth-telling.
Of course, I’m biased. Personally, I’m fond of legendary former Congressman Ron Paul’s philosophy of never supporting spending on a federal government program that is not authorized within the enumerated powers of the Constitution. It’s simply not the government’s job to fund things like health coverage for illegal immigrants, public radio, or woke social programs in foreign countries.
When it comes to spending cuts, I think our federal and state leaders should seize this moment, ignore the hysterics, and wield an even sharper blade.
This column originally appeared in Lee Newspapers.
