I’m old-fashioned about public spending. I think we should pay our bills, that deficits are bad, and those spending taxpayer funds are obligated to do so wisely and well. This is how I’ve always approached education spending, especially in Washington. After all, it’s our students who’re going to get stuck with the tab for our borrowing today that subsidizes padded payrolls, bloated bureaucracies, and outsized employee benefits.

When presidents Clinton and Obama championed new ed spending as a smart, sleek investment, I was dubious. Though learned economists argued that such spending would boost future productivity, I feared it would do more (as it almost always does) to produce red tape and excuse bad habits than improve outcomes. For decades, I’ve argued this in books like Common Sense School Reform and Stretching the School Dollar.

But these are tough times for an education budget hawk. Why? Because it’s damn hard to look unsympathetically at future-oriented outlays in education while politicians shovel borrowed cash at the over-65 set.

The temptation to live beyond our means may be eternal, but things weren’t always this bad. In the early 1980s, the bipartisan Greenspan Commission crafted a package of Social Security reforms that extended the program’s solvency by decades. In the 1990s, a Democratic White House and Republican Congress ran actual budget surpluses. By 2001, Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, who led that eponymous 1980s commission, was even fretting about the headaches that would result if Washington paid off the national debt.

Greenspan needn’t have worried. Between the Iraq War, the Great Recession, and the Covid-19 pandemic, policymakers justified big tax cuts and massive new outlays. The result: enormous structural deficits and a federal debt that quadrupled from $9 trillion in 2007 to $36 trillion in 2025. Last year, the federal government spent $7.1 trillion, of which $4.4 trillion was spent on benefits for individuals, with 62 percent going to those aged 65 and over (mostly for Social Security and health care). For every six dollars spent on seniors, a single dollar went to those under age 26 (mostly for Medicaid, food stamps, and education).

Oldsters get free stuff; youngsters get stuck with the bill.

It’s not like Washington can afford any of this. The U.S. borrowed $1.8 trillion last year, will borrow another $2 trillion this year, and is looking at steadily growing debt as far as the eye can see. Last year, at a 10-year cost of $245 billion, Republicans wedged President Trump’s tax breaks for auto loans, tips, overtime, and seniors into the reconciliation bill. Now, pols on both sides of the aisle are proposing new tax breaks for teachers, veterans, police, renters, and seniors.

As ever, The Dispatch’s Kevin Williamson brings an acerbic clarity to the numbers:

U.S. government debt has crossed a red line: Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP . . . On top of the $31.3 trillion in federal debt per se, there’s another $88 trillion or so (some estimates are higher) in unfunded liabilities for major entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare . . . Call it $120 trillion in the hole just to keep the number simple. That is just a little bit more than the total economic output of the entire human race in 2025.

Where’s all this money going? Williamson explains:

This debt is not driven by incontinent spending on a selection of boutique federal programs that you and your friends don’t like. The main drivers of our debt are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other medical entitlements, national security, and interest on debt already incurred . . . At present, Social Security by itself accounts for 22 percent of all federal spending; interest payments are 14 percent; non-Medicare health spending is 14 percent; [and] Medicare is another 14 percent.

In short, two-thirds of federal spending is for Social Security, health care (mostly for seniors), and interest on all the money we’ve borrowed. The U.S. will spend more than $1 trillion next year just in interest on the debt; interest on the debt is due to top $2 trillion a year by 2035.

Meanwhile, in last year’s reconciliation bill (the infelicitously named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”), Republicans took a budgetary process designed to help Congress balance the books and added more than $4 trillion in debt. With gas prices up due to the Iran War, President Trump is urging Congress to suspend the gas tax, potentially adding billions to the debt. Then there are the smaller exercises in plunder, like the $1.8 billion federal slush fund that Trump’s Department of Justice has devised for allies who claim they were targeted by the Biden administration.

Again, it all adds up to more free stuff for grown-ups and more debt for kids.

This puts me in a quandary. I just can’t muster much enthusiasm for trimming outlays on education data collection or Title I when those savings look like rounding errors compared to new tax breaks or monthly outlays for Medicare.

Look, I’ve spent a quarter-century railing against ineffectual education spending. I’m appalled that New York City spends $40,000 a kid to deliver dismal results, that $200 billion in Covid relief funds didn’t do much for students, and that taxpayers heavily subsidize enrollment at colleges that charge tens of thousands of dollars for eight courses and a dorm room. I’ve warned that bailouts enable bad spending choices and endorsed aggressive efforts to downsize the federal education apparatus.

But how can I decry spending on federal ed programs that nominally target those under 26, when these kids will inherit the tab for the self-dealing indiscipline of their elders? It’d be one thing if policymakers were cutting spending and raising taxes across the board in an all-hands push to get our affairs in order. But it’s nonsensical to give entitlements a pass and then pursue symbolic savings in education, one of the few outlays that are plausibly an investment in more than next week.

Nowhere does this register more clearly than with the new Federal Scholarship Tax Credit. By rights, I should be exasperated by yet one more unfunded tax cut, potentially exacerbating the federal deficit by billions each year. But how the hell can I question a program that’ll fund student scholarships when the same legislation carved out much larger new tax breaks for seniors and car buyers?

I can’t. I’m foursquare for the scholarship tax credits, whatever the fiscal consequences. A decade ago, I’d have called that hypocrisy. Today, I think it’s the only defensible stance in a capital that has embraced irresponsibility.

This spring, the Trump administration released a half-baked budget. It was laughably incomplete and envisioned massive deficits as far as the eye can see. But the education headline was clear: “Trump budget proposal would cut $2.3 billion for education in 2027.” Once, I’d have cheered this as a demonstration of fiscal discipline. In this case, I can’t. I can’t because the sums are trivial compared to our staggering mountain of untamed debt. In a world where the administration is busy widening a $1.8 trillion deficit, this feels more like picking on the kids than an exercise in fiscal responsibility.

Open the Books recently reported that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has dramatically shrunk expenditures at ED. Payroll was cut by $170 million a year, from $560 to $390 million. Hotel spending was slashed from $796,000 in fiscal 2024 to $1,100 in fiscal 2025 (nope, that’s not a typo). Spending on PR plunged from $17.3 million to $6,800 (again, not a typo). These are real wins. I’m glad to see these cuts.

But it’s hard to get excited about $170 million in annual savings when that doesn’t even cover 1/100th of what we’re spending this week in interest on the debt. Tough times for a budget hawk, indeed.

A final point, one which I trust will offend all the big-spending education advocates who’ve been nodding along.

It’s this: I’m sick and tired of hearing about our “precious kiddos” from those of you who are simultaneously burying those same kids in debt. You care about our kids? Demand that policymakers tackle Social Security and control health care spending. Insist that they pay for their new initiatives. Otherwise, chatter about equitable opportunity is just the soundtrack masking the grinding gears of intergenerational plunder.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”