With budget deficits rising to unsustainable levels and the federal debt limit becoming a dangerous political hot potato, Congress and the White House struck a deal to limit the growth of future spending.
That was 12 years ago. But the spending caps imposed as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011—while imperfect, occasionally bent, and eventually discarded by the very Republicans who originally championed them—essentially worked: From 2012 through 2015, annual federal budget deficits fell from over $1.2 trillion to about $430 billion, the lowest level recorded since 2007. The election of President Donald Trump snuffed out Republican interest in fiscal restraint, but the theory that guided those few years of budgeting remains strong. To best way to stop Congress from approving massive amounts of borrowing to fund an overextended federal budget is to put some artificial limits in place.
