DeSantis half right about government growth since 2019
The claim: Florida Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis dropped a striking statistic during a recent interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo.
“The agencies and government have grown 50 percent since 2019,” DeSantis told Bartiromo on July 9 on her “Sunday Morning Futures” show. “Is there any American that’s somehow better off as a result of that?”
PolitiFact Rating: Half true.
DeSantis has a point that federal spending is on track to grow by 43 to 55 percent over 2019 levels by 2024, depending on which measure you use. When adjusted for gross domestic product, the increase is smaller, about 11 percent.
However, spending is an imperfect way to measure the size of “agencies and government.”
Discussion
DeSantis’ campaign told PolitiFact his “Sunday Morning Futures” statement was based on federal spending.
However, such spending doesn’t reflect growth in the number or size of “agencies” or overall government infrastructure. Federal employment is up about 2 percent. And about two-thirds of federal spending goes either directly to Americans as cash payments or as payments for their health care, meaning that a large chunk of the increase in spending goes directly toward Americans, rather than the bureaucracy.
Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscally hawkish group, said a spike in inflation since 2019 is partly to blame for the rise in spending. The nation’s population also has grown during that period.
Towner said some of the growth has stemmed from a cohort of older Americans drawing more from Social Security and Medicare, plus the coronavirus relief bills, the bipartisan infrastructure law, a boost in veterans benefits, general increases to regular appropriations and bills to assist Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
To adjust for these factors, experts recommend comparing federal spending with the nation’s gross domestic product; a growing economy can support higher federal spending. Adjusted for GDP, the rise in spending from 2019 and 2024 was more modest — 11 percent. (GDP is the combined value of goods and services produced in a country in a given period.)
One big factor that DeSantis’ analysis misses is the nature of all this additional federal spending.
Much of the growth in federal outlays has come from rising entitlement spending, a category that includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits. In 2022, a little more than two-thirds of federal outlays went toward entitlements. An additional 7 percent went for interest.
The remainder is the best approximation of the “size” of government, because much of it (though not all of it) goes toward paying the federal workforce, constructing and maintaining federal infrastructure and other expenses that people tend to think of as “government.”
This share of federal spending, known as discretionary spending, accounted for a bit more than one-quarter of all federal spending. Of this, 11 percent went for defense and the remaining 14 percent went for areas other than defense.
So, when DeSantis asks, “Is there any American that’s somehow better off ” as a result of increased federal spending, the answer could be yes — anyone who received Social Security payments, insurance coverage from Medicare or Medicaid, or veterans’ benefits.
“(DeSantis) would be on much sounder footing to say government spending rather than agencies and government, since so much of that spending was not to grow the government footprint, but to actually respond to the bipartisan concerns about the pandemic and concomitant economic impacts,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C., group that tracks the federal budget.