The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? The Surprising Case of Barack Obama

In May 2012, MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting published an analysis that upended one of the campaign season's central Republican talking points. Crunching Office of Management and Budget data, he found that federal spending had grown at an annualized inflation-adjusted rate of roughly 1.4 percent under President Obama — the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower.

The comparisons were striking. By Nutting's math, spending had grown about 8.7 percent a year under Ronald Reagan, 8.1 percent under George W. Bush, and 3.5 percent under Bill Clinton. The president routinely attacked as a big-government spender was, on the numbers, the most frugal of the modern era.

But the finding came with a crucial caveat — and critics seized on it. The analysis attributed all of fiscal year 2009's spending to Obama. Yet FY2009 began in October 2008, under President Bush, and included the TARP bank bailout and the early stimulus spending that Bush had signed. Assigning the entire 2009 baseline to Obama, critics argued — including analysts at the Heritage Foundation — made his subsequent spending growth look artificially small, because the starting point was inflated by one-time emergency outlays.

Defenders of the analysis countered that presidents routinely get blamed or credited for their first year's budget, and that even with different attribution choices, the core picture held: the stimulus was temporary, and spending growth after 2009 was genuinely restrained.

The episode became a case study in how fiscal statistics depend on baseline choices — and how, in an election year, even the driest budget tables become political weapons.