by James A. Bacon

Judging by the headlines in Virginia’s newspapers, one might think that federal budget cuts are causing widespread devastation to government services and the economy. Here is a sampling from just the past couple of days:

NASA Langley workforce slashed by 40% in Trump budget plan — The Virginian-Pilot

“‘A smack in the face:’ Vouchers holders fear federal housing cuts” — The Virginia Mercury

Earle-Sears’ silence on Medicaid cuts ‘speaks volumes,’ Charlottesville Dems say — The Daily Progress

An after-school program in Trump’s backyard struggles to survive DOGE cuts — The Washington Post

Kaine, Warner condemn closure of Old Dominion Job Corps Center — News & Advance

I could go on… and on… but it would be tedious. The point is that Virginia’s wellbeing is funded to an extraordinary degree by the federal government — not just defense, entitlements, and payroll for government employees but innumerable programs underwriting everything from medical care and job training to daycare and housing for the poor.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) takes credit for cutting $150 billion (over how many years is not clear), and the One Big Beautiful Budget Bill painfully working its way through Congress would reorder spending, tax cuts and tax credits by hundreds of billions of dollars more each year in a package that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculates will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

If you think the pain from budget cuts is bad now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

America’s fiscal options are dwindling. The $36 trillion U.S. national debt is growing at the rate of about $1.8 trillion a year and is expected to do so more or less forever. What’s worrisome is the fact that debt is growing faster than the ability of the national economy to support it.

Based on current legislation and the projection of current economic trends, the CBO expects federal spending in the year 2035 to be $10.7 trillion and income to be $8.0 trillion, leaving a deficit of $2.7 trillion, or about one quarter of all spending.

Nearly $1.8 trillion will consist of payments on interest on the debt, which is uncuttable without triggering a default. That means the deficit in 2035 will be equivalent to almost 30% of spending not tied to supporting the debt — defense, entitlements, and discretionary programs.

It is impossible to calculate the magnitude of the DOGE/One Big Beautiful Bill spending cuts with any precision, but we could be talking a reordering of 2% to 5% of the federal budget, some portion of which will be offset economically (if not programmatically) by tax cuts. Compare that to Boomergeddon, when investors stop buying U.S. treasuries and the feds can spend only what they bring in through taxes. Thirty percent of all discretionary federal spending will be on the chopping block. Without offsets.

Boomergeddon will not be a case of investors waking up one day and deciding en masse that they don’t want to invest in U.S. treasuries anymore. It will be a process that unfolds over years, as indebtedness mounts, as investors demand an increasing risk premium on U.S. debt, as Black Swan events like the 2008 mortgage meltdown and 2020 COVID pandemic shatter the equilibrium, as the U.S.-dominated international order breaks down and China invades Taiwan or Iran fires a nuke at Israel, and as the Federal Reserve experiments with inflation as a way to execute a slow-motion repeal of the national debt.

We cannot continue on our existing path, and we won’t. It will break down. The only question is how long it takes.

Many politicians, cultural arbiters, entire industries and much of the American public are so deeply invested in the current order that they are in denial. The media feeds that denial by publishing dozens of articles about budget cuts, like the ones cited above, for every article that mentions the nation’s unsustainable fiscal trajectory. A vested interest opposes a budget cut; it fires off a press release; a complacent media rewrites the press release.

When the intelligentsia does take note of the doom spiral, it invariably casts the issue as a partisan one in which Democrats refuse to cut spending or Republicans refuse to raise taxes. Political drama. Good guys and bad guys.

Never are readers presented with scenarios of whose ox will get gored in the inevitable fiscal reckoning.

We get endless articles about the theorized Global Warming apocalypse a century from now, not one exploring the spending collapse to come much sooner.

We see articles highlighting how minorities are afflicted by DOGE cuts, but none exploring who will be the most vulnerable to a Boomergeddon meltdown.

Boomergeddon won’t come out of the blue. We’ll get plenty of advance warning in the form of harder and harder budget choices, more cries of anguish about unmet needs, and more desperate (and often harmful) measures to keep the leaky vessel of state afloat.

Governor Glenn Youngkin has done a commendable job of salting away rainy-day funds and other reserves to ease the Commonwealth of Virginia through its next fiscal crisis. We’re in good shape to weather a run-of-the-mill recession. But we’re in no condition to handle Boomergeddon. No one’s writing about that.

Virginians will rue the complacency with which they became dependents of the federal government. They will look back upon the hysteria created by the paltry budget cuts of 2025 and wonder how we could have been so blind.