Joe Biden’s Budget-Cutting Dogma Is a Threat to Public Health
Joe Biden is now pledging to “spend whatever it takes” to overcome this pandemic. But he’s spent his career putting public health programs on the chopping block as part of a decades-long crusade against government spending.
Democratic presidential hopeful former US vice president Joe Biden makes a point as he and Senator Bernie Sanders take part in the 11th Democratic Party 2020 presidential debate in a CNN Washington Bureau studio in Washington, DC on March 15, 2020. Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty
As the COVID-19 outbreak becomes an all-out public health and economic crisis, the 2020 election is being transformed. Rather than economic inequality, or even Donald Trump, this year’s election looks more and more like it will be fought over the current pandemic — and the inability of the United States’ ailing public health system to cope with it. And Joe Biden, the candidate favored to win the Democratic primary and face Trump, has a record of consistently undermining that health system. Despite pledging to “spend whatever it takes” to deal with the pandemic and the resulting economic fallout, Biden’s record is one of imperiling federal health programs and seeking to tie the government’s hands in a crisis, all for the sake of turning off the tap of government spending.
Biden’s Sunset
After winning office as a New Deal liberal, by the late 1970s — with politics beginning to turn in a more conservative direction, and with one eye on his reelection in 1978 — Biden shifted sharply right. In 1977, he introduced the Federal Spending Control Act, one of two pieces of “sunset legislation” that year aimed at meeting the moment’s anti-government, anti-spending mood.
Biden’s bill put all federal spending programs on the chopping block once every four years, mandating they be either reauthorized by Congress or automatically terminated, a harsh measure meant to force Congress’s hand. Some programs could be left out of the bill’s crosshairs “from time to time,” Biden explained to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, but only if the Senate passed a roll-call resolution doing so.
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