It is belaboring the obvious to note that the nation is in a spending and debt crisis. We're approaching $37 trillion in national debt, and spending is out of control. President Trump and Elon Musk stood up the Department of Government Efficiency - the DOGE - to try to stamp the brakes on federal waste, but it's slow going.
Looking at this as a budget/debt hawk, it raises the question: How have recent presidents stacked up when it comes to spending restraint? Well, economist and fiscal policy guru Daniel J. Mitchell has crunched the numbers.
In 2020, I crunched numbers from OMB’s Historical Tables to rank the fiscal performance of nine recent presidents, going all the way back to LBJ.
I was especially interested to see which presidents did best and worst when looking on overall domestic spending (entitlements plus discretionary).
The numbers showed that Ronald Reagan easily was the most fiscally prudent while Richard Nixon was the worst of the worst (though there’s an argument that LBJ was even worse when looking at the long-run impact of his policies).
Those, note, are the 2020 results - but Mr. Mitchell has an update.
That being said, that chart actually understates Reagan’s success. As I wrote last year, it “doesn’t even fully capture what he achieved since he was able to rescind some of the spending in Jimmy Carter’s last fiscal year.”
Time to rectify that oversight and we’ll base today’s analysis on a report from the Government Accountability Office. According to GAO, Reagan proposed to rescind more than $15 billion of spending in 1981 and Congress agreed to rescind nearly $10.9 billion.
So what happens if we update the budget rankings to capture this additional fiscal restraint? As you can see, Reagan’s remarkable record gets even better compared to the numbers I prepared in 2020 and Jimmy Carter’s so-so performance deteriorates.
Here's the chart:
Still the man. pic.twitter.com/At9ZKUCKc9
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) April 22, 2025
And, Ronald Reagan, after all these years, is still the man.
Mind you, President Reagan, transformative as he was, was the right man for his time. I voted for him twice, in 1980 and 1984. I was a Reagan campaign volunteer, although all I really did was hand out pamphlets and bumper stickers. He was the right man for the job then. I also think Donald Trump is the man for the job now; we have come far enough down a dark path that what we need isn't a happy warrior, it's a wrecking ball. Donald Trump is the president we need, and the one we deserve.
But he only comes in mid-way down the list on spending restraint.
Granted, none of this has had time yet to factor in the DOGE's efforts. As far as President Trump's current term, we're still operating under the Biden spending plan. It remains to be seen what will come of all this, but Ronald Reagan would seem to have set the benchmark - although seeing that number go negative would be even better. We have to get this thing under control; there are 37 trillion compelling reasons to do so.
See Also: Budget-Busting Climate Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act Must Go
Mr. Mitchell also notes:
You have to go back to Harding and Coolidge to find presidents who were analogous to Reagan.
And there's a name I was not surprised to see: Silent Cal Coolidge. We could use a little Silent Cal today.
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