The GOP's budget bill will hurt America’s global standing

And it will benefit our adversaries. But there's one glimmer of hope.

At the height of the COVID crisis, a headline in the Chinese Communist Party’s main newspaper declared that “America’s Main Opponent is Itself.” This was wishful thinking. America’s recovery from the pandemic crash showed again the advantages of our democratic system and dampened for a time the Chinese government’s confidence that it could win a struggle against us.

But that headline contained a grain of truth, one that echoed Lincoln’s famous line: “As a nation of freemen, [America] must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Precisely because of our inherent strengths, Americans can only defeat ourselves. And it’s hard to imagine anything more self-defeating than the big, ugly, blunder of a bill Congress just passed.

Here are three ways the GOP bill will hurt America’s global standing and benefit our adversaries. And, because that will likely depress you, I’ll add one silver lining.

Exploding the Debt

Deficit spending can lift a depressed economy. As a member of Congress under Presidents Donald Trump (first term) and Joe Biden, I voted for debt-financed bills that rescued us from the pandemic, and I don’t regret it a bit.

But to massively raise deficits at a moment of prosperity and peace—especially when the goal is not to invest in something that boosts our national strength such as infrastructure or manufacturing capacity, but to throw money at our wealthiest citizens at the expense of our poorest—is insane. And it will be seen as such around the world, reinforcing predictions of American decline that embolden our enemies and cause our friends to hedge against us.

Congressional Republicans believe Wall Street and corporate America will invest the windfall the bill gives them more productively than the government. But exactly the opposite happened after Trump’s 2017 tax bill. Then, as now, the U.S. economy was strong, and corporations didn’t need that much extra cash for long term capital investment, so they spent most of it on a drunken binge of self-enriching stock buybacks.

The GOP bill does invest in one source of American power by boosting the military budget. That’s fine—U.S. defense spending as a share of our GDP is actually at a historical low, even as threats from China and Russia grow and we’re telling our allies to spend more.

The problem is that by starving almost every non-military part of our government of revenue, the bill will force America to choose between bankruptcy and defunding all the other elements of our strength—from education, to infrastructure, to public health and science. It will make America more like Russia—a gas station with an army. The rising debt might even trigger mandatory spending cuts that hurt our military, too.

Surrendering the Future

Not long ago, most Republicans backed what they called an “all-of-the-above” energy policy. In other words, they supported solar and wind power. They just liked fossil fuels, too, and thought Democrats were pushing renewables too hard and fast.

The GOP bill completes the party’s shift from energy pragmatism to batshit crazy zealotry. To Republican members of Congress today, anything that encourages clean energy, no matter how business-friendly, is a “Socialist Green New Deal” program that must be obliterated.

Imagine if a leading American party in the 1920s had tried to protect the horse and buggy industry from the rise of Ford and GM, letting Germany and Japan lead the world in producing cars. Imagine if the leader of that party dismissed fears of losing a global competition by lying that he’s “never seen an auto factory in Germany” (as Trump just said he’s “never seen a wind farm in China,” the world’s top generator of wind energy).

The fastest-growing occupations in America are solar and wind turbine technicians. A quarter of our electricity already comes from renewables. Even if we didn’t care about climate change, we would need that number to grow to meet rising energy demand.

Meanwhile, China is totally dedicated to beating us in the race to dominate the most important emerging industry in the world, throwing every Yuan it can into inventing and deploying new renewable fuel technologies. If Republicans in Congress had been on China’s payroll, they could not have delivered it a more valuable gift than the GOP bill’s defunding of clean American energy. To have done so out of ignorance and fanaticism is no better.

Darkening the City on a Hill

In his final message to Americans before dying in 2018, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wrote that we “weaken [our greatness] when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down.”

Yet the biggest new spending item in the GOP bill is for the exponential expansion of an immigration enforcement army to deport millions of immigrants, including legal ones, from the United States in a manner designed to be as cruel and degrading as possible.

America’s greatest comparative advantage in the world is that we have at least tried to stand for ideals that distinguish us from our enemies and given hardworking people who embrace those ideals the chance to come to our country and make it stronger. We will not remain the leader of the free world if feeding immigrants to alligators is our calling card.

The deportation surge helps our adversaries in a more tangible way. The administration has been diverting resources and personnel from law enforcement and intelligence agencies like the FBI that defend the homeland from real threats—terrorism, gangs, drugs, espionage, malign foreign influence—to petty immigration enforcement. If you are a Chinese, Russian, or Iranian operative looking to steal our secrets, to bribe an American politician, to manipulate our elections, or even to kill someone on U.S. soil, this is a moment of opportunity, as Trump defunds the police to focus on deporting grandmothers.

A Ray of Hope

One of the Trump administration’s big priorities in the GOP bill was to prohibit states from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years. Child safety groups opposed it, along with a handful of Democrats, and, crucially, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). They argued that it might not be wise to deploy without guardrails a world-changing technology that does potentially dangerous things its own inventors admit they don’t understand.

But the biggest tech companies in America were lobbying hard for it. Trump wanted it. It passed the House with strong support from Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

And then, an amendment to strike it from the bill passed the Senate 99-1.

Think about it—in the debate on this bill, Democrats couldn’t break MAGA solidarity on Medicaid or SNAP cuts, on gutting clean energy, or on anything else, except on this one issue that involved standing up to Big Tech on behalf of ordinary Americans, and they won 99-1 after barely even trying.

The lesson here is that there is a broad constituency, including among many Trump voters, for stopping the harm Big Tech does to our kids and our democracy. So, Democrats, don’t shy away from this fight! We don’t have to be resigned to social media algorithms that amplify suicidal thoughts in our teens and the hateful lies that propel demagogues like Trump to power. We can win the AI race with China by building the safest systems, not just the fastest and most powerful ones. We don’t have to play nice with crypto billionaires selling scams and corrupting our politics just because they spend obscene sums of money on elections. If we take these companies head on, we will win.

A small number of Democrats (for example, Rep. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey) are starting to run against Big Tech. Blue states should seize on the failure of the state regulation moratorium and legislate away. This is a huge opportunity, and we shouldn’t need Blackburn’s approval to seize it.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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