The 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 founder, director 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 him as the director, the founder and the head of the Institute for Spending Reform. Zadek characterized the organization as nonprofit, nonpartisan, and private, dedicated to finding solutions to the escalating national debt, producing original insights, information and data that it presents to Congress. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Zadek recounted that Bydlak began his career in the financial services industry, in the private sector, as an investment analyst for one of the country’s largest hedge funds. He had been in an advisory role for numerous political candidates, and he started his real political career working with Ron Paul in Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
By a 2022 episode, Zadek described Bydlak’s career in the past tense relative to the Institute: before joining the R Street Institute, where Zadek said Bydlak was policy director for governance and a resident senior fellow, he was with the Institute for Spending Reform and he formed and headed up the Coalition to Reduce Spending. The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022)
Spending Tracker
Bydlak said that one of the things he learned through doing the work he does is that there is often a disconnect between what people see happening in Washington and who they think is to blame. He described conversations with people who say they do not like a new piece of legislation that passed but that their member of Congress is not the problem—it is everyone else’s member of Congress. In his account, people often lack clarity on the record of their individual members. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
To address that, Bydlak said the organization built Spending Tracker, a tool that takes all of the votes members of Congress are taking and cross-references them with what the costs of all of that legislation are. A user can see that a member of Congress has spent however many billions—or in some cases trillions—of dollars, look at the itemized breakdown of what exactly they were voting for, and decide whether that is a record they support. Bydlak described it as creating a report card for members of Congress, and said the important thing is that everyone has access to that information in a radically transparent way. He said the project had been a labor of love for almost five years, and that nothing else like it allows you to see not just how people are voting but what the implications of those votes are from a fiscal standpoint. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Bydlak said the website is spendingtracker.org, where a visitor can punch in a zip code or view the rankings; typing in a zip code brings the user to their member of Congress or their senators. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Rules, commissions and spending limits
In the 2020 episode, Zadek raised the Base Closure Act as a model: Congress, recognizing its own frailty and political inability to close military bases, appointed an independent commission that recommended bases to be closed on somewhat objective criteria of cost-benefit analysis, and Congress voted up or down on the whole list. Zadek said the commission did its work objectively and apolitically, Congress voted for the recommendations, and the bases were closed. He also recalled the period when Obama and the Hill could not reach agreement on spending and, rather than close down the government, cut back all federal spending across the board by the same percentage—which he said was the only time in our history that the budget deficit went down. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Bydlak summarized the point as: the rules matter. 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)
On a Balanced Budget Amendment, Bydlak said it conceptually makes a lot of sense, but that the way it has been proposed on a number of cases leaves the devil in the details of how to do it effectively. 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, though at the federal level it would essentially have to be imposed by a constitutional amendment, which creates a very high bar. He also cited Switzerland and Sweden, saying that contrary to the myth that Sweden is a socialist country, it has stringent expenditure limitations restricting how much its government can pay, implemented in the 1990s when it faced the entitlement crisis. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Across episodes
The Institute for Spending Reform appears in the 2018 and 2020 episodes through Bydlak’s descriptions of its work, and in the 2022 episode only as a past affiliation, when Zadek said Bydlak had been with the Institute before joining the R Street Institute; the excerpts show no development in how the organization itself is described beyond that change in Bydlak’s affiliation. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018) The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Institute for Spending Reform was founded, where it is based, its budget or staff size, or its legal form beyond being described as a nonprofit, nonpartisan private organization. They do not describe any specific legislative proposal the organization drafted or any bill it supported or opposed by name. They do not say when or why Bydlak left the organization, or who, if anyone, succeeded him. The 2018 excerpt ends with Bydlak’s invitation to visit spendingreform.org and Zadek’s sign-off, and no excerpt describes the organization’s later status.