The End of Immortality in Washington

Over the last several decades, you could count on your fingers (and maybe a few toes) the number of government programs that have been canceled — no matter how obsolete, inefficient or wasteful they were, and despite the fact that, in some rare cases, their missions were accomplished.

Even Ronald Reagan, who called for the cancellation of scores of programs, couldn’t get Congress to end the eternal life-support system. After watching Congress fund even the most inefficient agencies, he famously groused that “the closest thing to immortality on this earth is a government program.”

But to quote the back-in-vogue poet of the people, Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin’ in Washington.

Last week, the seemingly impossible happened. Congress terminated at least a half-dozen major programs, many of which fiscal hawks have been trying to terminate for nearly half a century.

The Trump rescission bill made it through the House and Senate and mothballs federal funding for National Public Radio, public TV, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Sorry, Elmo: Billionaires don’t qualify for taxpayer subsidies anymore. Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Committee pulled the plug on funding the corrupt World Bank — the multibillion-dollar piggy bank for globalists.

Nearly 100 parasitic “public interest groups” signed a joint letter howling in unison that this move to defund corrupt foreign aid giveaways would surely kill thousands — even millions — of people. Most of these groups are major recipients of the government largesse that is going away.

They are the epitome of the swamp.

Bravo to the Republicans for not caving in to them.

Meanwhile, the “Big, Beautiful” tax bill cancels many of the Green New Deal taxpayer handouts and the mandate that Americans and the government must buy electric vehicles. President Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, which pulled all the wrong levers during COVID-19 and then covered up its lethal errors and lies.

Critics dismiss these cutbacks as fiscal small ball — the equivalent of someone $10,000 in debt cutting their spending habit by $5.

But Trump is ushering in a much-needed cultural shift in the way Washington operates.

He is proving that Washington really CAN get rid of programs that don’t work. Does an enterprise losing $2 trillion a year need to be spending tax dollars on such supposed necessities as promoting veganism in Zambia, funding pride parades in Lesotho, wind farms in Ukraine, DEIA contractors in Belarus, promoting gender diversity in East Europe, and reproductive health climate policies in Central America?

Thanks to North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer for supplying this list of absurdities that are finally going away.

These and dozens of other programs have been zeroed out.

The worry, of course, is that Trump kills these programs only to see the next Democrat administration resurrect them like vampires.

Maybe. But for now, at least, the vast warehouse of thousands of federal programs — most of which you’ve almost certainly never heard of — is shrinking. They aren’t immortal after all.

Something tells me that somewhere up in heaven, Reagan is smiling.

Stephen Moore is a cofounder of Unleash Prosperity and a former senior economic adviser to Donald Trump. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”

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