As United States budget fight looms, Republicans flip their fiscal script

The head of a conservative Republican faction in the US Congress, who voted last month for a huge expansion of the national debt to pay for tax cuts, has called himself a “fiscal conservative” and urged budget restraint in 2018.

In keeping with a sharp pivot under way among Republicans, US Representative Mark Meadows, speaking on CBS Face the Nation, drew a hard line on federal spending, which lawmakers are bracing to do battle over in January.

When they return from the holidays, lawmakers will begin trying to pass a federal budget in a fight likely to be linked to other issues, such as immigration policy, even as the November congressional election campaigns approach in which Republicans will seek to keep control of Congress.

President Donald Trump and his Republicans want a big budget increase in military spending, while Democrats also want proportional increases for non-defence “discretionary” spending on programmes that support education, scientific research and environmental protection.

“The (Trump) administration has already been willing to say: ‘We’re going to increase non-defence discretionary spending by about seven per cent,’” Mr Meadows, chairman of the small but...