Is Trump More Reagan Than Reagan?

From Barry Goldwater in 1964, to Ronald Reagan in 1980, through the congressional Republican Revolution of 1994, the Tea Party movement of 2010, and to this day: Most Republicans throughout the modern era have presented their party as the one of fiscal conservatism and smaller government.

During this time, the federal government has grown significantly under presidents and Congresses of both parties, and especially under Republicans.

Reagan, a self-described “libertarian,” was the most explicit small-government conservative to actually be elected president. In the beginning, he accomplished a lot in the way of cutting government size and spending. Some even compare Reagan’s efforts to DOGE. But by the end of his second term, federal spending went up more under Reagan than it would later under President Barack Obama.

In 1987, Republican Congressman Ron Paul was not happy with Reagan.

When Paul left the GOP that year to run for president as a Libertarian, he wrote in his resignation letter, “Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party have given us skyrocketing deficits, and astoundingly, a doubled national debt. How is it that the party of balanced budgets, with control of the White House and Senate, accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together?”

He added, “There is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government. That is the message of the Reagan years.”

In the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term, his Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk has been finding, cutting and canceling wasteful spending and fraud in the federal government at breakneck speed.

On Tuesday, DOGE claimed to have saved $65 billion to date, with the savings coming from a “combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”

Ron Paul has been happy about this. On February 7, he wrote glowingly, “DOGE is ripping through the federal government like a tornado. This morning it has been reported that DOGE sent out firing notices to 9,400 USAID employees, leaving only 611.”

“Democratic politicians are furious, of course. But we hope that when it’s all said and done, ALL politicians, Democrat AND Republican, are furious with DOGE,” he added.

“Then we will know that it was a job well done for the American people.”

Some Republicans are already mad at Musk and the spending cuts, and DOGE hasn’t really even delved into Pentagon spending quite yet.

Critics of DOGE have said Congress must vote to cut spending, not merely cancel contracts, stop payments or other agency activity that could be more stopgap than permanent.

It’s a fair argument. Constitutionally, it is Congress that controls the power of the purse (constitutionally, so many of the agencies DOGE now targets shouldn’t even exist).

That said, last week Sen. Rand Paul introduced legislation that would cut $1.5 trillion. In the Republican-led Senate, it failed. This week, the Republican budget proposal being voted on would add billions to the deficit. Actual fiscal conservatives are hoping it doesn’t pass.

Any way you slice it, Trump and his new DOGE agency are doing what so many Republicans have long promised and failed.

Since Trump was first elected in 2016, various people on the right warned about the pitfalls of Zombie Reaganism, in which the conservative movement would continue to bog itself down, supposedly, in the tired old playbook of free markets, small government, and fiscal responsibility.

Some of these critics thought it better to use the existing federal apparatus for conservative ends. Some even wanted to expand the federal government for ostensibly conservative ends. As Trump’s second term unfolds perhaps they will get their chance.

Most of these self-described National Conservatives would also happily agree with libertarians that it has been delightful to watch the forever-war neoconservatives, who dominated the right for most of this century, become so diminished in the Trump-era GOP.

But far from constructing a right-wing New Deal, DOGE is doing the exact opposite, only a month in. This administration is carrying out the stuff of Reagan and Ron Paul’s revolutionary pipe dreams, the likes of which the Tea Party once envisioned, that so many conservatives spanning decades wanted to see in their lifetimes, and never did.

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan famously said. No doubt he believed it.

Donald Trump is doing something about it.