By Ben LuongoRonald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, spoke candidly years ago about why Republicans like tax cuts so much. In his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, he confided that tax cuts served the purpose of creating budget deficits that could then be used to justify spending cuts on government programs.
Typically, administrations had only cut spending for a program if it was no longer necessary, and the resultant surplus would then be used as a tax cut to stimulate the economy. However, Stockman turned this on its head by using the tax cuts to create a budgetary crisis that would then require cuts in spending regardless of whether the programs were necessary or not.
In other words, Stockman used tax cuts to create a revenue problem that the Reagan administration could then mask as a spending problem. This is known as “starving the beast.” The administration starves the beast—important government services—of important tax revenues in order to then justify slashing government spending.
Stockman himself admitted the failure of this strategy, since budget deficits during the Reagan administration did not bring down public spending in a meaningful way. This failure, however, didn’t stop the next generation of conservatives from making it a key part of their larger political project. In 2001 and 2003, for instance, George W. Bush pushed through massive tax cuts meant to impose a “fiscal straitjacket” on Congress. This then prompted Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to gut government programs.
Republican lawmakers attempted this again after they took control of the House of Representatives during the Obama administration in 2010. At the time, the U.S. economy was struggling through the Great Recession, which congressional Republicans blamed on government profligacy and “out of control spending.”
Not only did they hold the debt-ceiling hostage to prevent future spending, but they urged more tax cuts to stimulate the economy. In general, starving the beast has become a more common, and outright underhanded, strategy by which lawmakers have gone about cutting federal spending.
This strategy has also functioned as a form of class politics: Wealthy elites are often the main beneficiaries of the tax cuts financed by cuts in social services on which the average American is more likely to depend. For instance, Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act slashed top marginal tax rates from 70% to 50%, a rate that only the top 2% of Americans paid (those rates dropped even further to 28% in 1986).
This cut was largely paid for with reductions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid funding, student loans, and other social services. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 served the same agenda. According to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 20% received 65% of the benefits of those tax cuts, while the top 5% received 38%. Spending was then cut under the Deficit Reduction Act by targeting Medicaid, Medicare, the Migrant and Season Farmworkers Program, literacy programs, and others.
The American public is now far more aware of who has, and who has not, benefited from cuts in taxes and spending, and public opinion makes it harder for lawmakers to starve the beast. New polling shows that only 19% of Americans support the idea of cutting taxes on the wealthy, while 58% say the wealthy should be paying more (this number rises to 63% when asked about large businesses and corporations).
At the same time, the majority of Americans want the government to maintain spending on the kinds of programs that are usually targeted, such as Medicaid and food stamps, medical and cancer research, federal childcare programs, or the arts in public schools. In other words, Republican lawmakers are going to have a harder time gutting these programs by further cutting top marginal tax rates.
That is why they are finding new ways to starve the beast. The latest strategy has been to leverage the heavy cost of national security issues.
Nowhere is this more evident than through the U.S. and Israel’s joint war with Iran. The bombing of Iran has proven to be even more expensive than the initial stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the daily burn rate averaging around $1-2 billion a day. Shortly after launching the war in late February, President Trump sought an additional $200 billion from Congress to fund it. The GOP is now using that price tag to plan massive cuts to important government programs.
In early April, for instance, Republicans proposed a reconciliation bill they claim would save $30 billion but would also drive up the out-of-pocket premium costs and increase the number of people without health insurance. Later that week, Trump candidly spoke of his intentions to slash government spending against the backdrop of a budgetary crisis caused by the war:
“We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars […] Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection—we have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.”
Trump’s claim that the United States can’t afford these programs are patently false. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid are planned spending that are not responsible for budget deficits.
However, the president’s comments make sense when contextualized against his longer-term plans to rein in federal spending. Through the creation of DOGE, Trump attempted to usher in an era of “government efficiency,” which included sharp reductions in several programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Although technically still operational, DOGE is largely seen as a failure, as it never achieved its goal of major spending cuts (in fact, government spending increased 6% in 2025).
The Iran war can complete the job that DOGE couldn’t. Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64% increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades. In doing so, Trump is essentially reviving the starve the beast strategy by fitting it into a large military project.
Although the strategy to starve the beast has changed, the class politics remains the same. Those affected will be those most reliant on programs designed to provide healthcare, education, and food. However, in this case, the consequences are no longer restricted to the U.S. taxpayer. The increase in military expenditures will be used to inflict harm upon vulnerable populations abroad. The strikes in Iran have already killed thousands of people and displaced over a million civilians.
The horrifying reality is that this carries the very real danger of becoming a common finance strategy. What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs? Trump’s war in Iran establishes just such a dangerous precedent. For this reason, the American people must realize that their livelihood at home requires placing greater controls on what a president can do abroad.
~ Ben Luongo is an assistant professor of political science at Union Commonwealth University in Barbourville, Kentucky. His research focuses on issues of international human rights and political economy.
