THE THERMOSTAT AND THE THUMB: 

In 1985, a handful of senators looked at a mounting deficit and did something almost un-American: they tried to bind their own future selves. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings set a declining numerical target for the national deficit, backed by an automatic trigger — if Congress failed to hit the number, spending would be cut across the board, mechanically, without another vote. No debate, no last-minute deal, no blinking. It was a thermostat, not a New Year's resolution.

This was, in its way, a small act of genius. The framers of the law understood something true about human institutions: willpower is not a governing strategy. If painful choices are always optional, they will always be deferred. So instead of asking Congress to be virtuous, the law tried to make virtue automatic — to remove the moment of choice entirely and replace it with a mechanism.

It didn't work, and the way it failed is more instructive than the design itself.

First came the constitutional problem: the Supreme Court ruled that Congress couldn't hand its own agent the power to execute the law, since execution is the Executive Branch's job. That flaw, at least, was fixable — and was fixed. Later versions moved the trigger to OMB (the Office of Management and Budget), and the machinery has held up legally ever since.

The deeper failure was epistemic. The law measured something that had to be ‘forecast’ — a ten-year deficit trajectory dependent on guesses about growth, revenue, and recession. And forecasts, it turns out, are wonderfully pliable in the hands of people who don't want to be constrained by them. Rosy growth assumptions, one-time accounting maneuvers, payments shuffled across fiscal years — Congress didn't break the rule so much as it out-imagined it. The target kept receding into an ever-more-flattering future.

Later reforms learned this lesson. Two in particular, PAYGO and the Budget Control Act's spending caps, didn't try to predict the economy; they measured what Congress had actually just voted for, scored against a neutral estimate, in real time. These made it harder to leave things dreamy. And this was the brilliance: an evolving, self-correcting attempt to build guardrails smart enough to survive contact with self-interest. Each generation of reform patched the last generation's loophole. That is a genuinely impressive feat of institutional engineering — the fiscal equivalent of learning, slowly, not to trust yourself.

But here is the folly, and it never really went away: every one of these mechanisms has always included an exit. An Emergency Waiver. A Supplemental Appropriation. A Tax Cut carved out and declared exempt. The 2001 tax cuts sailed past PAYGO. So did the wars that followed, and the stimulus after 2008, and the tax cuts of 2017, and the relief packages of 2020. Every rule America has built to bind its own hands has ultimately deferred to a simple truth: a Congressional majority vote can always suspend the rule that a prior majority vote created. No statute can bind a future Congress — only a constitutional amendment can do that, and Americans have never quite trusted themselves enough, or distrusted themselves enough, to go that far. Balanced-budget amendments have been proposed for decades and have always died, in part because rigid fiscal rules really do perform badly during wars and recessions — the very moments when deficit spending is often exactly right.

So the American system designs fiscal discipline extremely well, again and again, learning from each collapse. What it cannot design away is the fact that the discipline is always, at bottom, optional — a procedure sitting downstream of political will, waiting for the next emergency, election, or ideological conviction to declare itself the exception.

That may be the most honest thing one can say about American governance: it is a system brilliant enough to build a thermostat, and vain enough to keep its thumb permanently on the override switch — and to call that thumb, when convenient, an act of leadership.