Three thousand years ago, Solomon, the third King of Israel, said, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” This was true then and holds true today, especially when politicians and tax dollars are involved.

Every Republican, from hard-line fiscal libertarians to milquetoast centrists, campaigned on cutting government spending while running for office last year. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was supposed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, slashing comically corrupt or counterproductive expenditures. But, of course, none of that happened.

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DOGE was nothing short of a cataclysmic failure. Only $160 billion in spending was highlighted by the fledgling agency for elimination, and the House GOP completely ignored those recommendations. Musk left his government post to focus on his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, while so-called fiscal conservatives passed a bill through the House, with the president’s full support, that would spend more money than former Presidents Joe Biden or Barack Obama could ever imagine.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said. “I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”

If passed in its current form, the “big, beautiful bill” would increase the annual federal deficit from roughly $1.9 trillion under Biden to $2.2 trillion, and that number could balloon to $2.6 trillion if the 2017 Trump tax cuts are renewed without offsetting costs. There is hope that the bill could be amended significantly by the Senate, but GOP members are under pressure from the administration to pass the bill. President Donald Trump has already called for a primary challenge (again) in Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) district after the fiscal conservative opposed the bill’s reckless spending increases.

Despite the threats, some senators appear to be taking the debt and deficit seriously, at least for now. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), one of the only consistent fiscal hawks left, told Fox News Sunday, “The problem is the math doesn’t add up; they’re going to explode the debt.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told CNN’s State of the Union, “We have enough [votes] to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”

Trump admitted that he expects “significant” changes to be made to the spending bill in the Senate. However, it is unclear if enough senators, besides Paul, Johnson, and Massie, are willing to endure the ridicule and threats from the press and the leader of their party to fix the fiscal abomination that is Trump 2.0’s first spending legislation. 

THE SENATE CAN IMPROVE THE ‘BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’

Political, rather than economic, realities will win the day. If there is no political will among Republicans in Congress to use their trifecta of power to right the fiscal ship, this bill will pass largely unmolested, to the detriment of not only ourselves but future generations. The anemic bond market is already signaling that confidence in the U.S. economy is declining due to out-of-control spending and the president’s erratic trade war. Adding between $22 trillion and $26 trillion in new debt over the next decade, in our current predicament, would be insane, to put it mildly. Forget paying it off; it would become increasingly difficult to sell U.S. debt if the current trajectory continues.

Despite the unfortunate nature of the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the United States is not fighting a major war, the COVID-19 pandemic is in the rearview mirror, reversing Biden’s negligence seems to have fixed the crisis at the southern border in short order, and the GOP controls the White House and both houses of Congress. If any of those factors were to change in the near future, fiscal responsibility would become more difficult, if not impossible. If not now, when?

Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.