View from K Street: Budget bluster

Almost all of our ancestors, from all around the world, had a common dismissal of the boisterous promise followed by a pitiful result: “The mountain labored and gave birth to a mouse!” Or perhaps we should quote Shakespeare’s diminished King Lear: “I will do such things/ What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be/ The terrors of the earth.” It is no surprise that these belittling characterizations can be once again applied to the actions of our national trash fire—the House of Representatives.

This time, it’s the budget, another last-minute hustle to avoid a self-created crisis, another stepping back from a ruinous, self-destructive government shutdown. And for what? No pride flags on embassies? No kidding! It’s a budget filled with empty gestures—an unexplained 6% cut of the State Department while they are dealing with Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, China, Russia, Niger, Sudan, Haiti, even Hungary? A 2.5% cut to the Department of Labor (DOL) budget at a time of growing demands on every agency? “A terror of the earth” to chastise the Wage and Hour Division for trying to expand overtime? Flatlining the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the face of an explosion of representation petitions to punish it for all those pro-union decisions—just as the president promised? Cutting the FBI and ATF because there’s a diminished need for their services? Or to materialize a MAGA distaste for their efforts to enforce the laws without preference or prejudice?