Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for March 16, 2025

Bill Clinton enacted his Reinventing Government package of streamlining restructuring (REIGO) in 1993, when he still held legislative majorities. It was passed by a margin of ONE VOTE. Al Gore was the one who actually drafted the plan in writing, which was published under the title Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, by Al Gore (I still have a print edition of the book). All Republicans voted against it, along with several Southern Democrats who would soon re-register as Republicans.

Republicans warned that it would explode the deficit and scared everyone into turning the government over to Newt Gingrich. Of course, the opposite happened. Deficits shrank each year until they crossed over into positive territory and then ran surpluses.

Every year in his first term, Clinton reduced the annual budget deficits, by increasingly larger margins each year. In the first year of his second term, he passed a budget with a small annual budget SURPLUS, which increased in size each year of his second term.

Only two presidents have achieved budget surpluses in the last 60 years — LBJ and Bill Clinton. And only two more president in that time has even reduced an annual budget deficit from one year to the next: Barack Obama, who reduced the budget deficits every year after his first, though he never got all the way to surplus, and Joe Biden, who has reduced the deficit each years he was in office though he also did not get all the way to zero (surplus) as LBJ (despite the costs of the Vietnam war, the Apollo moon program and trying to get a nascent “war on poverty” off the ground, which Nixon promptly crushed) and Clinton were able to accomplish. LBJ spent a lot of money, but his stimulus to the economy grew broad-based, widespread prosperity and a larger tax base; Clinton slashed government spending in this “Reinventing Government” (REIGO) program that not one single Republican voted for.