How Republicans Built “Super-Sized Government,” According to Stephen Slivinski
In 2006, John Aloysius Farrell wrote a column for The Denver Post about a new book from the Cato Institute’s budget director. The book argued that Republican control of Washington had produced faster spending growth than the party’s critics expected. PorkBusters ran an excerpt of the column during its campaign against congressional earmarks. What follows is that column’s argument, with the numbers checked and the history filled in.
The argument: Republican control and federal spending
The column began with libertarian voters. Farrell wrote that they had backed Republicans for years because the party promised to shrink government, and because they believed Republicans were the better choice than Democrats. Religious conservatives had made the same bet on social issues, in his telling.
By 2006, Farrell wrote, critics inside that coalition had concluded that Republican control had brought higher spending, new federal agencies, a larger national security apparatus and an elective war. Those were things libertarians said they opposed.
At that point Republicans had held Congress for about a decade and the White House for five years. Stephen Slivinski, then director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, described the result in a colorful phrase. The federal “cesspool” the party had promised to drain “feels less like a cesspool than a hot tub,” he said.
“Republicans just don’t act like the party of Goldwater or Reagan anymore,” Slivinski told a Cato audience the week before the column ran.
In his 1996 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton said that “the era of big government is over.” Slivinski answered him directly: “It’s been replaced by something far worse, the era of Super-Sized Government, and for that we have Republicans to thank.”
Who Stephen Slivinski is
Slivinski is an economist. The column called him a Floridian and said he had trained at Cato, George Mason University and the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. His political hero, Farrell wrote, was Barry Goldwater: the Arizona senator who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and an early leader of the conservative movement.
The book is Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government, published in 2006 by Thomas Nelson’s Nelson Current imprint in Nashville. The column pointed readers to it with the short link http://tinyurl.com/hh6bo. Cato now lists Slivinski as a senior fellow whose research covers barriers to economic growth at the state and local level.
The book’s case for divided government
Farrell wrote that the book was bad news for Republican strategists who wanted free-market conservatives to turn out in the fall 2006 elections. Slivinski argued that divided government protects individual rights and taxpayers’ wallets best. He concluded that voters should hand either Congress or the White House to Democrats.
With full control, Slivinski argued, the GOP had failed. In his account the party had adopted Richard Nixon’s political pragmatism and grown too close to special interests and lobbyists. He compared it to the political machines of the late 1800s and early 1900s, whose main goal was staying in power.
“Cutting government spending now runs contrary to Republican political aims,” Slivinski wrote. “Today the GOP is so closely aligned with the mechanisms of Big Government that it finds itself unable and unwilling to shut the contraption down. The corruption scandals that have afflicted the Republican Party… are a natural by-product.”
Republican leaders of the time disputed this. They pointed to post-September 11 security needs and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the drivers of new spending. At a Cato forum on the book, the columnist Robert Novak said conservatives agreed Republicans deserved to lose in 2006 but disagreed about whether losing would be a good thing.
The spending numbers Slivinski cited
Slivinski based his case on budget growth adjusted for inflation and for time in office. “George W. Bush is the biggest-spending full-term president since Lyndon B. Johnson,” he wrote.
Overall budget growth
“In Bush’s presidency so far the federal budget has grown by 27 percent after adjusting for inflation,” Slivinski wrote. “That’s more than twice as fast as during the eight years of President Clinton.” That figure covers only Bush’s first five years, not his full two terms.
Growth by category and president
The figures below are Slivinski’s own 2006 calculations of average annual real growth, as quoted in the column.
| President | Entitlement spending growth | Spending growth excluding entitlements, defense and homeland security |
|---|---|---|
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Not given in the column | 4.1% |
| Jimmy Carter | 4.1% | 1.6% |
| Bill Clinton | 3.3% | 2.1% |
| George W. Bush (through 2006) | 5.1% | 4.5% |
The second column matters most to his argument. It strips out the war and the big benefit programs, which leaves the discretionary spending Congress controls year to year. On that measure the Bush years grew fastest of the four.
Defense spending
Slivinski wrote that real defense spending in 2006 was about $440 billion. By his inflation-adjusted figures, that was more than the peak of the Reagan buildup ($399.6 billion) and more than Johnson’s largest Vietnam War budget ($421.3 billion).
Defenders of the spending pointed to the war on terror. Slivinski’s answer was that only about 15 percent of defense spending since September 11, 2001, including the Iraq war, had gone to fighting terrorism.
Earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere
Earmarks were one of Slivinski’s main explanations. They are provisions in spending bills that send money to specific projects chosen by members of Congress, often in their home states. The best-known example in 2006 was Alaska’s Gravina Island Bridge, which critics called the “Bridge to Nowhere.” The column linked to coverage of it at http://tinyurl.com/femzk.
What happened to the bridge
The bridge became a national story, and its history is now settled:
- In 2005, the federal highway law included three earmarks worth $223 million for a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island, which is home to the town’s airport.
- On October 20, 2005, the Senate rejected an amendment from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) by 82 to 15. The amendment would have moved Alaska bridge money to rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.
- Later in 2005, Congress removed the earmark designation. The money still went to the Alaska Department of Transportation, which could now spend it on other projects.
- On September 21, 2007, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) formally canceled the bridge. Most of the money was spent on other transportation projects in the state.
How many earmarks there were
Slivinski said that the last Democratic-controlled Congress, before the 1994 elections, approved 1,439 earmarks, and that by 2006 the number was over 15,000. “Republicans have actually become more promiscuous than Democrats when it comes to earmarks,” he said. “They’ve become cogs in the Big Government machine.”
Earmark counts depend heavily on how they’re counted. The 1,439 figure matches the narrower count the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste used for that period. Congressional Research Service data, which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) cited in 2006 Senate testimony, counted more broadly: 4,126 earmarks worth $29.6 billion in fiscal 1994, and about 15,877 worth $47.4 billion in fiscal 2005. Both counts show the same trend: a several-fold increase during the years Republicans controlled Congress.
Divided government in the 1990s
Slivinski argued that Washington is most restrained, both militarily and fiscally, when the parties share power. In his reading of American history, the country more often went to war under one-party government, and “united government gives us government that grows twice as fast.”
His main example was the period after 1994, when Republicans won the House and spent six years in budget fights with the Clinton White House. Slivinski wrote that, in that period, federal spending fell from 20.7 percent to 18.4 percent of gross domestic product, and the budget was balanced. The government ran surpluses from fiscal 1998 through fiscal 2001.
“This trend was reversed almost immediately after George W. Bush’s inaugural parade,” Slivinski wrote. “Together Bush and the Republican Congress managed to expand government spending to 20.8 percent of GDP in 2006. By this standard, they have effectively overturned the Republican Revolution.”
The government has revised its GDP data many times since then, so today’s official tables show slightly different percentages. The figures above are the ones Slivinski reported in 2006.
Slivinski’s advice to libertarian voters
Slivinski’s advice to fellow libertarians was unusual for a Goldwater admirer. He proposed term limits for Republican incumbents and electing enough Democrats to produce divided government.
“If you can’t put your faith in a political party,” he said, “perhaps you should put your faith in gridlock.”
What happened after 2006
Voters produced the divided government Slivinski described. In the November 2006 midterms Democrats won both the House and Senate, and they controlled Congress for the last two years of the Bush presidency. In 2007 they adopted new earmark disclosure rules. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 created Senate Rule XLIV, which requires senators to disclose their earmark requests and certify that they have no financial interest in them.
The ban and the return
Earmarks became a central issue in the 2010 elections. After Republicans won the House that year, they adopted a moratorium starting in 2011, and Democrats followed. The ban was a party and committee practice, not a law. In 2021, House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) reopened requests under the name Community Project Funding, and the Senate followed with Congressionally Directed Spending. Republicans kept the system when they retook the House in 2023, with some changes.
How earmarks work as of November 2026
These are the rules for the fiscal 2027 cycle:
| Rule | House (Community Project Funding) | Senate (Congressionally Directed Spending) |
|---|---|---|
| Total cap | One-half of 1% of discretionary spending | 1% of discretionary spending |
| Requests per member | Up to 20 | Varies by spending bill |
| Who can receive money | Governments and nonprofits; no for-profit companies | No for-profit companies |
| Disclosure | Requests posted publicly online | Requests disclosed; no-financial-interest certification under Rule XLIV |
| Bills closed to requests | Defense, Financial Services, Legislative Branch, National Security-State | Set by committee guidance |
Fiscal 2027 began on October 1, 2026, under the Continuing Appropriations Act, 2027 (Division A of P.L. 119-103), which runs through December 11, 2026. Stopgap laws don’t carry new earmarks, so the fiscal 2027 project lists will only be funded if Congress passes full-year bills.
In the November 3, 2026 midterms, Democrats won majorities in both chambers, according to network projections. The new Congress takes office on January 3, 2027. The current lame-duck Congress has to decide whether to finish fiscal 2027 spending before then or pass it to the next Congress.
About the original column and PorkBusters
John Aloysius Farrell’s column ran on Sundays in the Perspective section of The Denver Post. Readers could comment on his columns at the paper’s Washington blog, www.denverpostbloghouse.com/washington. When PorkBusters reposted the excerpt, it credited the full post to Amazing Facts.
PorkBusters launched in 2005. It was a campaign by bloggers, including Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and N.Z. Bear of The Truth Laid Bear. They asked readers to find spending in their own members’ districts that could be cut to pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery, and to call their senators and representatives about specific earmarks. The campaign ended as Congress moved toward the 2011 moratorium.
FAQ
What is “Buck Wild” by Stephen Slivinski about?
Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government was published in 2006. Slivinski wrote it while he was director of budget studies at the Cato Institute. It argues that Republicans, while controlling Congress and the White House, increased spending faster than recent Democratic presidents had. It concludes that divided government restrains spending better than either party alone.
Was George W. Bush really the biggest spender since Lyndon Johnson?
That was Slivinski’s finding in 2006, measured as real spending growth adjusted for time in office. The ranking depends on how you measure. War spending, the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law and post-2001 security spending all raised Bush-era totals, and Bush’s defenders said those costs were unavoidable. Critics like Slivinski pointed to growth in nondefense discretionary spending and earmarks too.
Why do earmark counts for the 1990s and 2000s differ so much?
Different groups counted different things. Citizens Against Government Waste used a narrower definition. The Congressional Research Service counted more broadly, finding 4,126 earmarks in fiscal 1994 and about 15,877 in fiscal 2005. Every method shows a large increase between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.
Are earmarks banned in Congress today?
No. Congress banned them from 2011 and brought them back in 2021, as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate. They are capped at half of 1 percent of discretionary spending in the House and 1 percent in the Senate. Each request has to be disclosed publicly.
What happened to the Bridge to Nowhere?
It was never built. Congress removed the earmark designation in 2005 but let Alaska keep the $223 million for transportation. Gov. Sarah Palin formally canceled the project on September 21, 2007.
What was PorkBusters?
It was a campaign against congressional earmarks run by bloggers, launched in 2005. Its organizers included Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and N.Z. Bear. They asked readers to identify local projects that could be cut to pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery and to contact members of Congress about specific earmarks.
Sources
- Congress.gov, Congressional Research Service: Overview of Continuing Appropriations for FY2027 (Division A of P.L. 119-103)
- Congress.gov: H.R. 6500, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027
- Congress.gov, Congressional Research Service: Status of FY2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations
- Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: 2006 earmark testimony by Sen. John McCain citing CRS data
- Cato Institute: “Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government” book forum and Slivinski profile
- National Taxpayers Union Foundation: Tracking FY2027 House and Senate earmark requests
- FactCheck.org and PolitiFact: Bridge to Nowhere records
About this article
- Fact-checked before publication.
- Published · Updated
