Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
By American standards, Medicaid and Medicare are pretty efficient. So any cuts are going to mean that either doctors get paid less or fewer health services are provided. Yes, politically, Republicans can get away with cutting Medicaid, but it’s the much smaller piece of
the pie compared to Medicare. Good luck with either one of the options above with Medicare.
As for defence, procurement is a giant money tree for defence contractors, but a large part of the reason why it remains a giant money tree for contractors is that they build plants in every single congressional district there is, so trying to apply some sanity to the defence procurement process is politically untenable. Beyond that, are you going to be the one to tell the Marines they don’t need their own aircraft carriers?
Of course, tanking the American economy by removing a significant chunk of its labor force (undocumented immigrants) and increasing costs (by putting tariffs on things) is just going to make the problem harder by crunching revenue.
The right of politics has forever claimed that they can painlessly cut taxes, and it’s always nonsense.
> DOGE is BS. Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
It took me years to understand that this line of reasoning is why Trump won (twice). I noticed in my own job, that whenever someone would propose an moderate but still-obvious improvement, someone else would smack them down saying "that's not the highest priority!" In the end, nothing ever gets fixed.
I think people see Trump as that guy who steamrolls the naysayers and gets shit done.
Now, I disagree that Trump really gets any useful thing done, but I definitely recognize that constant naysaying against any improvement is a real actual problem.
I disagree with this. Here are a few tidy Republican stances:
- Gun violence? Eh. Nothing we can do there. Best to just get used to it. Thoughts and prayers.
- Climate change? Nothing to see there. Drill baby, drill!
- Covid? Best to just ignore it, let it run rampant, let the weak die. No biggie.
- Universal healthcare? It'd totally suck. Wait times. Higher taxes. Pay no attention to the nearly 100 other countries successfully pulling this off.
The Republican Party is the party of maintaining the status-quo, insisting solved problems are unsolvable. Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party's central thesis is: Government is inept. Let's neuter it as much as possible. Many of us see DOGE just as a cringely-named continuation of this mission.
The party Trump ran as a candidate for has spent at least 40 and perhaps 70 years insisting the government is your enemny and government cannot get things done.
The fact that is rather difficult to make changes to the government so that it runs more efficiently and gets better stuff done might - just might - be related to the fact that one of the two major political parties in the USA is absolutely bound to the "fact" that this is not possible.
It's like when an entire slate of candidates running on "elect me for a pure and uninformed outsider take!" get elected to the city council and suddenly you spend a year with council meetings turning into 101 lessons from the city staff on what the fuck the council is responsible for.
>Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
Some ppl collecting SSI have other income over $400k. They won't miss $30k of SSI. The dem's plan was to tax that overage - not even remove it altogether - to maintain SSI, but "they're eating the dogs and cats" won and now the unelected guy who made his fortune on government contracts is in charge of choosing who to cut off from that government money supply.
> in a way that would leave government services unaffected
I’m not sure what “unaffected” means. Do you mean from the end user perspective? Or government employee perspective?
I think people underestimate the overhead associated with many government services. Even thing like social security disability have 30-40% of the money not going to the recipient, it’s going to the administration.
If you were able to improve social security administration efficiency (benefit validation, denial appeal, check mailing costs) by just 10%, you just reduced social the federal budget by a few percentage points. That’s huge.
My own experience with government services is that significant efficiencies could be squeezed out and keep the end user service the same (or better?).
So let's, for the sake of argument, say that there are two hundred similarly sized efficiency savings to be found in the US federal budget.
Congratulations, you just saved 200 billion dollars of expenditure.
The difference between expenditure and revenue in 2023 was 1.7 trillion.
Let me be clear - if money is being spent poorly, that is bad and it should be spent more effectively, or not spent at all. I'm just trying to demonstrate that "waste", at least waste as it is traditionally understood, is almost irrelevant in any attempt to balance the federal budget.
There absolutely are, but not all of them are good ideas for other reasons. One of the big things that I think many "run government like a business"-types fail to consider, is that fairness, equitability, checks-and-balances, democratic process, quality of life, etc are often inherently inefficient.
Every system has inefficiencies, including the government.
The fallacy is to assume that businesses inherently have less inefficiencies than government and/or that a government’s cost/benefit equation improves if it’s run as a business. Often, their functions overlap and this can be the case. Automated traffic monitoring is cheaper than having people count cars. But beware privatization that promises efficiency and lower costs—the result is almost always worse services, maintainable debt and in time a government bailout.
Often, their functions do not overlap. The purpose of social security is not to tighten spending as much as possible, it is to improve quality of life as much as possible.
Let me quote you: "Are you suggesting there is no possible way to make the government more efficient in a way that reduces costs by some significant amount?"
But DOGE is basically “make government more efficient”, so they are interchangeable.
Trying to give an analogy like “i don’t like football” and “we should kill all football players” for my statement is pretty disingenuous and a massive strawman itself.
We’re trying to explain to you that they’re NOT interchangeable. What you’re doing is applying a false syllogism, but in question form.
Let me illustrate with an example in a statement form: “A rock can’t fly. You can’t fly, therefore you are a rock”.
You’re saying “A wants to do X. You are criticizing A, so you must object to X being done.” That is making an unjustified leap to your conclusion. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, this is a logic error.
IF you spent a bit of time analyzing your statement you'd realize that the Government doesn't just take money but also give it out.
And not just to employees and benefit receivers but also entrepreneurs and companies.
It's by far the largest single economic actor and statistically speaking given the size of such a large actor it is more likely than not you ended up breaking even as far as quality of life (QOL) when considering all your transactions (in money and services) with the Government.
Given the economic growth measured by GDP in the period 2000-2024 even more likely is that you ended up ahead.
Except in many, if not most, cases a company’s inefficiencies IS your problem. The perfectly informed rational consumer doesn’t exist. We’re forced to buy what’s on the shelves that we can afford, and the water in the pipes and power on the grid. When the businesses collude and price fix and lower the quality of your goods you DO suffer and your only recourse is regulation.
And get out of here with that libertarian “services I don’t use” nonsense.
> Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
But surely that’s the only way out? Figure out some sane taper scheme by age or something. Social security was created when the old people population was a tiny fraction of what it is now, no way it would have ever passed it with today’s numbers. We’ll have to rip off the bandaid or face the consequences.
Taking money from one group of people and giving it to another isn’t “government waste”, though. It’s essentially zero-sum (unless you get way down into the details of the economic effects of how that money gets spent or saved.)
If you had told people when SS was passed that "granny doesn't die of hunger" is "zero sum", you might have needed martial arts skills to avoid the pitchforks coming your way.
And that's not "way down into the details of the economic effects" - it's the raison d'etre of SS.
I’m replying to the parent commenter and giving him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he’s talking only about social security payments which are beyond the essential, and which could “safely” be cut back. I recommend to you to also interpret comments generously before replying.
> By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Sure..and all hidden waste projects can be fit into those 3 categories. Things like federal funding on hotels for illegal immigrants, including many millions on unused hotel rooms. ~$400 per person per night for illegal aliens. ~$80+ million USD in a few months.
> DOGE is BS.
Basically DOGE is only BS if you think fraud and waste are not BS. Why don't you actually look at the large number of waste projects on https://x.com/DOGE before saying it is BS ?
It is ~42 billion for welfame, $70 billion USD for schooling, $7.5 billion for the uninsured, etc, totaling to around ~150 billion. This is also around the figure confirmed by DOGE.
It would be nice if you can refute the data on facts.
It’s not an official figure. It’s a figure calculated by an anti-immigration “think tank”.
And even taking their numbers as gospel, it’s 1.1% of the federal budget - and it’s not like you can claw back that 1.1% either, because the enforcement mechanisms required to expel and keep illegal immigrants out of
the USA would cost very substantial amounts.
Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
By American standards, Medicaid and Medicare are pretty efficient. So any cuts are going to mean that either doctors get paid less or fewer health services are provided. Yes, politically, Republicans can get away with cutting Medicaid, but it’s the much smaller piece of the pie compared to Medicare. Good luck with either one of the options above with Medicare.
As for defence, procurement is a giant money tree for defence contractors, but a large part of the reason why it remains a giant money tree for contractors is that they build plants in every single congressional district there is, so trying to apply some sanity to the defence procurement process is politically untenable. Beyond that, are you going to be the one to tell the Marines they don’t need their own aircraft carriers?
Of course, tanking the American economy by removing a significant chunk of its labor force (undocumented immigrants) and increasing costs (by putting tariffs on things) is just going to make the problem harder by crunching revenue.
The right of politics has forever claimed that they can painlessly cut taxes, and it’s always nonsense.