Back to the future: The return of Gramm-Rudman

Talk about 11th hour.

With just a little more than one day before the U.S. Treasury — absent new borrowing authority — begins to behave like a deadbeat on the nation's obligations, news emerged of a $2.4 trillion debt deal from congressional leaders and the White House.

Presumably, the rank and file in both houses will vote on this deal sometime today.

As the Deseret News went to press, parties had not released detailed paperwork about the deal. As has been true throughout most of this exhausting debate, the specific adjustments to federal spending still remain opaque. But the basic contours of the deal take us back to the future.

It was 1985, and America's top-grossing film, "Back to the Future," had Michael J. Fox (playing Marty McFly) time travelling across three decades for answers to his adolescent concerns. That same year, President Ronald Reagan had taken up his second term with record popularity and record budget deficits.

Although Reagan's budget gave lip service to minor cuts in domestic discretionary spending, there was little seriousness from the White House budget that year about deficit reduction. Sound familiar?

But Sens. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, Warren Rudman, R-N.H. and Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., offered up a major deficit reduction bill that Rudman described as "a bad idea whose time has come." The bill, that came to be known popularly as Gramm-Rudman, required the federal deficit to be cut by specific amounts over several years.

But recognizing how easy it was for government to evade such long-term budget targets, Gramm-Rudman built in a concept known as sequestration: across-the-board mechanical cuts to domestic and defense spending when budget targets were not met.

It appears that a major component of today's debt deal takes us back nearly three decades to adopt this same Gramm-Rudman model.

In addition to roughly $900 billion in specified cuts over the next 10 years, Congress, through the means of a special joint congressional committee, must identify roughly $1.5 trillion in additional deficit reduction by November.

If the joint committee is unable to come up with the requisite deficit reduction (which could include tax increases as well as spending cuts), then gargantuan mechanical cuts kick in. Word has it that about 50 percent of the mandated cuts would come from important Democratic priorities (such as Medicare) and about 50 percent could come from important Republican priorities, such as the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.