Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to say goodbye to the once-proud Washington animal that we knew until last week as the “GOP budget hawk.”
The hawk died of self-inflicted wounds after promising for years to rein in the country’s spiraling debt and deficits, but then voting to do the exact opposite by lining up behind President Donald Trump’s massive tax cut and spending package known as the, “big, beautiful bill.”
Instead of cutting deficits, the bill Trump signed into law on July 4 will add trillions to the national debt over the next 10 years according to multiple independent budget analyses. The bill will also raise the country’s debt limit by $5 trillion, the most of any bill in history. Republican budget writers did all of this by combining $1 trillion of health care and food assistance spending cuts with hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending for defense and immigration enforcement, and $4.4 trillion worth of new and extended tax cuts.
Altogether, the nonpartisan Pete Peterson Foundation said that the legislation,will increase the U.S. national debt by $3.4 trillion. Sweet, dead GOP budget hawk, rest in peace.
The Republican budget hawk was born in the 20th Century as the Republican Party platform began to focus on fiscal conservatism, smaller government, and lower taxes. Hawks also fueled the rise of the Republican-aligned Tea Party movement in 2008 and 2009, when grassroots conservatives revolted over government bailouts for bad loans and failing banks.
Based on pledges and promises alone, every current member of Georgia’s House Republican delegation could rightly have been considered a budget hawk, too, up until last week’s votes.
At the beginning of this year, U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons Island, pledged on social media that, “Our national debt has increased by $4.12 million per minute over the last year. Donald J. Trump and House Republicans will restore fiscal sanity.”
Likewise, at the first-ever Department of Government Efficiency subcommittee hearing that U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, chaired in February, she described the federal debt as “chains and shackles” on every American. “The American people are in debt slavery to every one of the people who own our debt,” she said. “It will destroy us.”
In 2024, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson, called the Congressional Budget Office’s increasing debt projections “mind boggling and civilization-ending numbers.” He later wrote that cutting the federal debt and deficit “MUST, and has to be, Congress’ top priority as we do 2025 spending bills.”
U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens, warned last year that the United States was on the road to financial ruin and “fiscal calamity” because of Congress’ addiction to spending money it doesn’t have.
And in an impassioned speech on the House floor during the last month of the Biden administration, U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick warned that unchecked federal spending would eventually lead to the failure of U.S. currency and the end of America’s global economic dominance.
“If we do nothing,” he warned, Social Security will become insolvent, Medicare will run out of money, and “the debt will disrupt everything we know in America to be good.” Seven months later, McCormick was at the White House to watch Trump sign his big, beautiful budget buster after voting with every other Georgia House Republican to support it.
Never let it be said again that Republicans really care about reducing debts and deficits, because once they were in charge and had the chance to act, they did the opposite last week with the big, beautiful bill.
There were a handful of exceptions among the GOP hawks in Congress, who stuck to what they’d been saying for years and voted against Trump’s bill. Their reviews of the package are instructive to see.
After he voted no, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told reporters, “Without question this is not a fiscally conservative bill, and if you’re someone who thinks the debt is a problem, I don’t see how you can vote for this.”
U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said, “It will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates.” And Elon Musk, the father of the DOGE movement, called the bill “a disgusting abomination” and promised to start a new political party called “the America Party,” to defeat the “Porky PIG Party” responsible for raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.
“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!” he wrote on X. “And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”
The GOP budget hawk is survived by the Republicans in Washington, who will promise to do one thing on the debt, but then do another, and Democrats, who don’t seem especially bothered by Washington’s out-of-control debt accumulation at all.
In lieu of flowers, you may want to send a donation to a candidate who both cares about the deficit and votes that way, but there’s no word at the moment about who that could be.
Goodbye, GOP deficit hawks. We hardly knew you.
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