WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, spent two decades in Congress talking about reining in Washington’s profligate ways and overhauling the nation’s ballooning entitlement programs. He touted those views as the GOP’s vice presidential candidate in 2012. He will depart Congress with his goals undone.
Ryan instead leaves a legacy of dramatically expanded government spending and immense deficits. The GOP is led by a president Ryan initially rebuffed, and his party has rejected his free-trade philosophy and support for reforming the nation’s immigration laws.
As he announced his plans to retire Wednesday, Ryan boasted about the passage of the GOP’s $1.4 trillion tax law and of securing much-needed increases in defense spending in last month’s $1.3 trillion government spending bill.
‘‘These I see as lasting victories that will make this country more prosperous and more secure for decades to come,’’ he said.
But both measures contributed to a mushrooming deficit that the Congressional Budget Office projected this week will reach $1 trillion in 2020. Ryan has sounded the alarm about the nation’s deficit and debt for years but leaves the situation worse than he found it despite proposing a series of budgets over the years that slashed spending and transformed Medicare into a voucher program for younger Americans.
None of those proposals became law, and President Trump has taken Medicare cuts off the table.
Ryan acknowledged Wednesday that ‘‘more work needs to be done. And it really is entitlements.’’ But he added that he was proud that the House had passed what he described as ‘‘the biggest entitlement reform bill ever considered in the House of Representatives,’’ a reference to legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act and remaking the Medicaid program. That bill was rejected by the Senate.
Allies praised the legacy Ryan leaves.
‘‘He’s been working on fundamental tax reform for 20 years and now he’s gotten it done. He’s been working on entitlement reform. It may not happen on his watch but they were working on Obamacare before Obama was even born,’’ said House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas. ‘‘Some of these ideas will be achieved in one Congress, some will take many congresses. But he was the one who really showed the way.’’
In the short term, though, Ryan leaves behind a record of a sharply expanded deficit.
He became speaker Oct. 29, 2015, shortly after the gap between spending and revenue had contracted to $438 billion. The following year, the deficit grew to $584 billion, and then again to $666 billion in 2017. The deficit is expected to top $800 billion in 2018 and eclipse the $1 trillion mark in perpetuity after 2020.
Based on some measures, the government already has more than $20 trillion in debt, and it must make large interest payments to continue borrowing. This is expected to eventually overwhelm the federal budget, particularly if interest rates rise. But Ryan’s obsession with these issues were no longer shared by conservative leaders, particularly after Barack Obama was no longer president.
Ryan has long believed that Congress should take drastic action to rework health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, allowing more free-market competition to lower costs for the government and improve care. Some Democrats, including Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, have at times worked with Ryan on ways to fix those programs, but those efforts have failed and liberals mostly were unified against him in recent years.
Trump, during the 2016 campaign, promised voters that he wouldn’t touch Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid if he became president, effectively emasculating Ryan’s long-held goals.
‘‘A lot of the political weight in the party has certainly moved away from that position,’’ said Lanhee Chen, who served as policy director to Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign. ‘‘It has made it extremely difficult for people who care about fiscal discipline, as I know he does, to operate.’’
Retired Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who worked closely with Ryan during a massive but ultimately failed 2010 bid to reduce the deficit, described the lawmaker as a ‘‘very sensitive, special man.’’ He said Ryan’s Republican colleagues never rallied to his side when it came time to take tough votes on addressing the most costly programs.
