The US government is barreling toward a partial shutdown on March 2 all because Congress can’t agree on a budget. The major obstacle is a small group of hardline Republicans in the House, who prefer to trigger $100 billion of automatic spending cuts than produce a bipartisan budget. Such tactics might make for clever political sound bites but are poor economics.

Automatic spending cuts would fall entirely on non-entitlement expenditures, which encompasses everything from things like grants for biomedical research to body armor for the military. But the Congressional Budget Office was already projecting such spending to shrink, from 28% of the federal budget currently to 21% in 2034.