Musk wants to slash trillions in “waste.” Good luck, buddy!
Two. Trillion. Dollars.
That’s how much Elon Musk, co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, has said he can cut out of the annual federal budget. Musk and his partner Vivek Ramaswamy have suggested that they can achieve this through “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” by cracking down on spending “unauthorized” by Congress, and “large-scale audits” of federal contracts. Their target wouldn’t be entitlement programs “like Medicare and Medicaid,” they say, but “waste, fraud, and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.”
If you could actually cut this much, it would wipe out the US’s $1.9 trillion deficit and put the country into surplus for the first time since the 2001 fiscal year. But let’s be clear: There is no way in hell Musk and Ramaswamy are going to be able to identify $2 trillion in annual spending to cut, and they certainly will not get anywhere near that number without congressional action.
To see why, consult this simple chart of projected federal spending in fiscal year 2025, which began on October 1:
I’m using the current fiscal year, but you’ll see something similar in any given year. The biggest single program is Social Security (which I’ve grouped here with its companion program, Supplemental Security Income). Trump has promised he will not cut 1 cent from Social Security, so that’s roughly $1.6 trillion out of the $7 trillion budget off the table.
The next-largest is interest payments on federal debt, accumulated from prior deficits. Musk’s America PAC has bafflingly listed this as a form of government waste, but failing to pay interest on past debt would constitute a US default and likely lead to a national, and probably global, financial crisis and recession. While we can reduce future deficits and pay less interest in the future, we’re obligated to pay interest on debt we’ve already accumulated.
So there’s nothing to save here either.
