Big is Not Beautiful: The Fed Budget Bill is Grand in Size but Grotesque in Guise

While the most obvious element of the enabling nanny state is the vociferous anti-DOGE crowd, perhaps the more insidious element of the constituent-devouring political class are leaders who give lip service to tackling our debt but lack the fortitude to do the difficult but right thing when faced with possible political fallout.

As I unpacked in my last post on this topic – https://jpweaverjr.com/index.php/2025/05/02/the-mericans-costly-lesson-part-2-why-the-nanny-needs-to-go/, the US is in the beginning of a debt death spiral with over a trillion in annual financing costs alone. This “One Big Beautiful Bill” is certainly big, but an honest eye beholds no beauty, as it is projected to add another $2 trillion a year to the national debt. The bond markets concur with rising yields—this bill is ugly!

The reality is, DOGE only has the power to eliminate a limited number of discretionary items. They are there to uncover waste, fraud, and abuse, and then Congress needs to cut and appropriate funds accordingly. If Congress does not follow through, the efforts will all be for naught. I am 100% behind DOGE, but it appears that the administration and the complicit members of Congress are using DOGE as a means to give the American people a sense that something is being done, while doing nothing to actually stop the death spiral.

“A democracy can only exist until its voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.” The problem is, our political leaders have gotten into power by getting their constituents “stuff.” We must understand the gravity of the situation. We are complicit in this crisis because we have not held our representatives to account and have not been willing to give up our piece of pork. “We the people” need to grow up, own our part in this, and demand fiscal responsibility.

Our federal budget jumped by around 60% during COVID. We can debate the necessity of this spending during the pandemic, but the big problem is, we never normalized back to pre-COVID levels. Here is the good news: all we need to do is put every line of spending back to inflation-adjusted pre-COVID levels. That’s it! That gets us to Ray Dalio’s 3/3/3 ratio where we can grow out of our debt. Senator Ron Johnson from the great state of Wisconsin is leading a coalition of responsible Senators working on the current spending bill and lays out three options to get back to a pre-COVID budget.

This is quite manageable now in the early stages of the death spiral, but given the exponential nature of our problem, we are quickly approaching a point of almost impossible return. This issue is not a partisan issue; I urge you to do the math and put aside blue and red bias. The Senate is working on this right now. Make some noise and contact your representatives. We are at a historical moment. I believe there is the political will to take action, but it lies below the surface, and we the people need to send a strong signal to our leaders in D.C. that we are serious about getting our house in order.