This week on Facing the Future, host Bob Bixby spoke with Bill Hoagland, Senior Vice President at the Bipartisan Policy Center, about a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on public engagement with government budgets. They also discussed recent developments on the budget front in Washington.
Hoagland recently traveled to Paris to participate in an OECD conference, where the report titled The People and the Budget: Empowering Public Understanding of Public Finances was released. He emphasized the report’s focus on demystifying the budget to make it more understandable to the public, moving away from jargon and abstract figures like debt-to-GDP ratios that often fail to resonate with everyday citizens.
“We need to make it more understandable to the American public,” Hoagland said. “Debt to GDP may be important for budget geeks, but it doesn’t really resonate to the individual out there that’s affected.” He also stressed the importance of clearer communication, including using modern tools and platforms favored by younger generations, such as Instagram and TikTok, to reach a broader audience more effectively.
The conference explored alternate ways to explain fiscal realities, including the household budget analogy and the generational perspective—that today’s borrowing is effectively charging the costs to future generations. Hoagland noted the difficulty in convincing people to worry about long-term fiscal sustainability when immediate concerns like high inflation and daily expenses dominate their lives.
Nevertheless, Hoagland remains convinced that public engagement is crucial. “You just can’t go to the elected officials and say, do this, do that, unless you have the public backing,” he said. He quoted directly from the report: “Engaging citizens is no longer just a public relations exercise. It is at the core of sound fiscal decisions and essential for building more responsive, effective and efficient public institutions.”
“We need to give elected officials a spinal implant,” he quipped, pointing to the ongoing challenge politicians face in balancing necessary fiscal reforms with the political risk of losing reelection—a dilemma captured by the EU president’s quote, “We know what we have to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected if we do it.”
Hoagland pointed out that “effective fiscal communication is rooted in institutional credibility,” and that the United States currently suffers from historically low public trust in government. “If you can’t trust your government, you can’t trust the numbers that the government is providing to you,” he said. This lack of trust remains a significant barrier to meaningful fiscal reform.
The discussion also included the latest Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report, which revealed no major changes in insolvency dates: Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2032, with a potential 22% across-the-board benefit cut if no action is taken. The Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund faces insolvency by 2033, potentially triggering an 11% cut to provider reimbursements.
Hoagland noted that these projections are unfortunately familiar and stressed the urgency of action: “The next elected president, as well as the next Congress… this will be on their watch,” he warned. “They cannot allow those funds to be depleted.”
Turning to the current federal budget process, Hoagland described the situation as dire. While the House of Representatives has passed one of the twelve annual appropriations bills for fiscal year 2027 and approved eight others in committee, the Senate has made no progress.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is at an impasse even over the overall funding levels, reflecting the intense political environment. Hoagland predicted another continuing resolution or possibly a government shutdown before the elections, noting, “I don’t see, in this very politically charged environment… that we’re going to be able to come to an agreement on this portion of the federal budget.”
Hoagland also discussed the troubling trend of using the budget reconciliation process—a tool originally intended to facilitate deficit reduction—to fund appropriations bills, such as Homeland Security, thereby bypassing the traditional appropriations process and the Senate filibuster. He warned that this cedes too much control over spending to the executive branch and undercuts the constitutional power of the purse vested in Congress.
Hoagland raised concerns that if one party ignores the appropriations process, the other may follow suit when in power, further eroding fiscal discipline. He cautioned, “If you have a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Democrat in the White House, then why wouldn’t you then do the Health and Human Services bill … a very large spending bill… through reconciliation as opposed to working out agreements?” He concluded that this trend could worsen the nation’s fiscal challenges rather than help control debt and deficits.
