ZadekpediaThe Institute for Spending Reform is a nonprofit, nonpartisan private organization dedicated to finding solutions to the escalating national debt. It produces original insights, information and data, which it presents to Congress. Jonathan Bydlak is its director, founder and head. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Leadership and origins
Bob Zadek introduced Bydlak as a spending guru and as the enemy of out-of-control government spending, and described the Institute as nonpartisan to be sure. Before his career in the private sector, Bydlak worked with Ron Paul in Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign; he had earlier been an investment analyst for one of the country’s largest hedge funds and had served in an advisory role for numerous political candidates. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
By the time of a later appearance, Bydlak had moved on: Zadek described him as policy director for governance and a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, and said that before joining R Street he was with the Institute for Spending Reform and formed and headed up the Coalition to Reduce Spending. The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022)
Spending Tracker
Bydlak described the Spending Tracker as a tool built to close the disconnect between what people see happening in Washington and who they think is to blame. He recounted conversations with people who say they dislike a new piece of legislation but insist their own member of Congress is not the problem. The tool takes all of the votes members of Congress are taking and cross-references them with the costs of that legislation, so a user can see that a member has spent however many billions — or in some cases trillions — of dollars, and can look at an itemized breakdown of what exactly they were voting for. Bydlak characterized it as creating a report card for members of Congress, and said the project had been a labor of love for almost five years. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
The website is spendingtracker.org; a user can punch in a zip code or view the rankings, and a zip code brings up that person’s member of Congress or senators. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Rules over individuals
Bydlak’s summary position was that the rules matter, and that the rules in which members of Congress operate are very important. He said both sides make a mistake when they assume that electing a couple of better people will change things, because members of Congress are political creatures who operate within a certain infrastructure. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
He called the Balanced Budget Amendment conceptually sensible but warned that the devil really is in the details in terms of how you do that effectively, and that at the federal level such a limit would essentially have to be imposed by a constitutional amendment, which creates a very high bar. He cited Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights as the most effective tax and expenditure limitation that has been enacted, and said it would be fantastic to have something like that at the federal level. He also pointed to Switzerland and Sweden, noting that Sweden has stringent expenditure limitations restricting how much its government can pay, implemented in the 1990s when those countries faced the entitlement crisis. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Across episodes: the sequester and the Budget Control Act
The same question — whether spending can be cut without members of Congress paying a political price — is argued in the 2018 and 2020 episodes, with Bydlak advancing the argument both times. In 2018 Zadek called the sequester the one bill he could remember that had a positive effect upon the budgeting process and upon spending in a very profound way, and asked why not just have permanent sequester of funds. Bydlak answered that rules matter, that the Budget Control Act was very effective, and that spending went down back-to-back years for the first time since the Korean War — something he said almost certainly would not have happened without it. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018) In 2020 Zadek returned to the same ground, recalling the Base Closure Act and its independent commission, and the across-the-board cut adopted when Obama and the Hill could not reach agreement, which he said was the only time in our history that the budget deficit went down. Bydlak again answered that the rules matter, and extended the argument to the Balanced Budget Amendment, Colorado and Sweden. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020) The later treatment adds the comparative and state-level examples; the earlier one rests on the sequester alone.