One wonders if Musk and Ramaswamy have even a passing familiarity with the federal budget. The only possible way to achieve Musk’s [$2 trillion] cost-cutting goals would be to take a wrecking ball to entitlement programs, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The budget for federal discretionary spending, which is determined annually in the congressional appropriations process, was $1.6 trillion in fiscal year 2024, or about 26 percent of spending. Even if that figure were zeroed out—fully abolishing, for instance, the FDA, EPA, USDA, NPS, HHS, DOJ, FAA, DOE, and NASA—Musk would be well short of his goal. A further 13 percent (around $800 billion) of the federal budget went toward interest payments on the country’s debt, which would be economic suicide to stop paying. Mandatory outlays, in the form of automatic spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, and income security programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, take up 61 percent (around $4 trillion).
Lambert here: In other words, it’s been known fromsince launch that DOGE was not, and could not be, about cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Oddly, or not, DOGE is characterized, to this very day, as a cost-cutting drive for efficiency our famously free press. One can only wonder why,
Musk presumably does not actually want to delete agencies that give him multibillion-dollar contracts. The only way to make the cuts he’s talking about would be to gore Medicare and Social Security. What’s most likely to happen is Musk and Ramaswamy will leverage Twitter/X to deceive the public into believing that disastrous cuts to important but trivial federal expenditures are emblematic of widespread government waste.
DOGE is a new weapon in Trump’s ongoing war against the administrative state. But it’s important to remain clear-eyed about the value federal civil servants provide. These individuals help ensure the safety of our food, medicine, transportation, air, and water. They are also the backbone of our education, health care, and financial regulatory systems. There is no doubt that many Americans feel burned by their recent interactions with these systems, but federal employees are the wrong targets of their ire. If we want a government that is readily equipped to challenge the corporate villains who are committed to padding their bottom line regardless of the consequences to ordinary Americans, then protecting civil servants and government services must remain top of the agenda.
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