I for one am curious how this turns out. I give it an 80% chance of failing spectacularly, 20% chance of 'wow, we were wasting that much money?'
The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic. It doesn't -feel- like much has ever been done to address it.
Well, now someone decided to just sledgehammer the whole thing. I'm both horrified and hopeful at what comes from that.
The thing is, clumsy attempts to save money by randomly shutting down departments or firing staff can easily end up costing much more, by creating expensive problems that the departments were in charge of preventing. Or when a couple of years later it turns out you needed those things, and it's very expensive to try to start up a thing again, replace all the lost knowledge and institutional experience etc.
It's not an accident. The whole point is to destroy these institutions, they've made no secret of that.
I get that there's plenty to not like about the Federal Government (and by plenty I mean a lot), but the answer to addressing that is to fix the problems rather than burn everything to the ground.
Sure, by 3M votes. Fact is that no, most of the country did not ask for this.
In fact, Trump explicitly lied about project 2025 during the campaign. So many may have been swayed to vote Trump, with the understanding that project 2025 was not on the table. Those people did not ask for this.
Inaction by the other majority of non-voters is accepting that this route wasn't any less desirable than Harris's plan. So yes, most of the country at best didn't care.
Oh, but they did.
Trump has been spewing out his plans for 10 years. His inability to understand complex situations, lack of world knowledge, ignorance of history.
The voters knew exactly what they were voting for.
Just like economics has been found to have far from rational actors, it's clear that there are millions of "low information voters". Many of them likely voted for him because he's that actor on tv who entertains them.
But yes, plenty of his voters heard what he had to say and liked it.
Tangent: in the United States, more people believe in angels than in evolution (69% vs 60%).
The US Federal government is 36 trillion in debt and trending deeper; with ratios to GDP reminiscent of WWII where the US established the global not-an-Empire that it currently enjoys. I'm not sure "this could be expensive" rises to the level of anyone caring. The situation is already well beyond the limits of what anyone who cares about cost could cope with.
"failing spectacularly" to me looks more like collapses of the international monetary system or generalised large scale riots. Which could easily happen, the US government is responsible for about half the US economy; look at the USSR for what can happen when that sort of system gets dismantled too quickly. Mere large monetary amounts are not a factor these days.
Unfortunately, none of this DOGE bullshit will do anything to the spiraling debt.
The majority of the US budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid and defense spending. This is about 60% of the budget.
The billionaires are in control of the US now as oligarchs and defense spending is how they suck up money.
So that is never getting cut.
Social security and Medicare will be untouched even though they talk about cuts, because that's how they keep a good chunk of their voting base placated.
The cost of medicare/medicaid will continue to spiral to the moon as the Trump admin killed the governments ability to negotiate drug prices again, because this is good for the oligarchs. But even ignoring pharma, the cost of services is still growing out of control.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if Medicare ends up spending more per enrolled member because they'll force CMS to be more heavily reliant on Medicare Advantage plans administered by private insurers.
>Social security and Medicare will be untouched even though they talk about cuts, because that's how they keep a good chunk of their voting base placated.
There are plans in place to cut medicaid to reduce the corporate tax. Trump is in full DGAF mode, he's not running for president again so his mask is off. Heck, at the speeds he's going he may get everything he wants in place before Midterms anyway.
That means we’re virtually redirecting funding from many agencies to medicare/medicaid (and military, sadly). Not a bad thing, if it requires every other govt agency to be shutdown, that we prioritize health.
Axing research grants and datasets has a lot to do with faith-based medicine. Why would one value cancer research, for example, if they believe illness is punishment for sin?
> The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic. It doesn't -feel- like much has ever been done to address it.
In terms of "growth", the number of federal civilian government employees has basically never been lower as a percentage of the population.
It's all consumed by the military industrial complex, which no doubt will have a continual budget increase as it does every year regardless of the administration.
Military analyst Ryan McBeth argues the military industrial complex is nowadays a lot smaller and less influential than people think - he even uses a mental shortcut "military industrial complex does not exist" [1] - make of it what you will. His arguments seem pretty convincing to me.
In the big picture I'd probably mildly agree with his view that the defence industry proper isn't the US's biggest problem right now and railing against Military-Industrial complex is using the wrong term. But his arguments are a bit weird.
He classifies the Tech companies as not part of the military industrial complex, which seems like a mistake. The US tech industry is integrated with the US intelligence establishment and is effectively part of their military presence. Musk, for example, was making a very visible contribution to the Ukranian war effort with Starlink. Google & Facebook are a bigger threat than the US military when it comes to governments being taken out in my opinion and the US military is probably more of the same mind than they let on.
He's also very focused on earnings which is a headscratcher. He has revenues right next to that, and revenues are what matter. Earnings just say the US weapons producers are an inefficient industry which isn't a matter of controversy because it doesn't matter much. He seems to be confused about what figures to look at.
Yes and no – I do believe that the MIC, explicitly stated, doesn't exist now as it has before: he illustrates it by noting the fact that the top five legacy arms and defense manufacturers don't earn as much, or have the same market cap, as the top five in other companies (say, tech.)
But arguably a lot more companies that aren't on the face of it defense and arms manufacturers are getting a larger and larger piece of the pie. Tech companies rely on defense – and "national security" – spending as key revenue streams, and they've built the connections with the government to match. (I think both SpaceX and Oracle are very much obvious examples now.)
So, perhaps the definiton of the MIC has to be updated for the 21st century to include "national security" spending and other significant technical suppliers.
Well, there's actually a HUGE historical downsizing that happened; this is actually something that really caught people off guard with Russia's invasion of Ukraine - the US MIC is a tiny fraction of the size that it used to be, and honestly isn't prepared to supply a "peer conflict" where two industrial powers are in a stalemate that they can't seem to break, so they're throwing as much ordinance as they can produce at the enemy to try to break through.
Thank god, this also hit the Russians incredibly bad, but yeah; people's perceptions of the production capacity of both countries is wildly, wildly overestimated.
The MIC basically had its budget slashed by ~80% or so after the cold war. Thousands of factories were permanently shuttered, hundreds of companies more or less ceased to exist - sometimes some of their engineers were aqui-hired by other firms, but by and large they just stopped working for the MIC in general.
This is what they called the "Peace Dividend"; when the Soviets collapsed, we no longer felt we needed a military that could repel a conventional assault from the Soviet Union (with all 700m citizens, and the heartland of industrial Europe (i.e. Germany, Poland, Czechia) backing them). We just, worst-case, needed to stop Russia and their 140m citizens.
They called it that because it unlocked a huge chunk of the budget that previously went to the MIC. A literal dividend of money.
in 2024, the US Fed collected 4.9 Trillion in taxes and spent 3.8 trillion (78% of revenue) on the following programs: Social security, Medicare, health, and income payments like disability.
It also had 1.8 Trillion dollars of deficit spending, bringing the total to 6.7 trillion with welfare taking up (57% of total spending). The fed spent 0.9 trillion (13%) paying interest.
Is it not mostly social security and military spending? I.e. not bureaucracy, but what is essentially a savings program and massive wealth transfer to the MIC, neither of which are being affected so far. All this, plus reckless tariffs starting trade wars with the US's closest allies do not inspire confidence that this will have good outcomes.
Note that including social security in the budget spending is misleading. It's essentially a trust fund (albeit under funded) so you can't cut spending in it. You could cut contributions and payouts (essentially privatising retirement even more), but the effects would only be noticed in decades.
I am 62 years old. What is the number 1 discussion topic with my retired colleagues?
How to minimize taxes in retirement. (the RMD causes panic because if forces taxation). Many get a pension, social security, have a 401k, paid off house, and savings. Not everyone needs social security.
As a side note, federal employee salaries themselves (*) account for less than 8% of the federal budget. What that says about the intent of slashing the workforce is beyond me.
The intent is to remove anyone that may get in the way of the upcoming grift. And with most of (social|traditional) media wanting to be part of the grift, they will happily help him convincing the masses there’s nothing to see here.
I don't believe there is really any interest in balancing the Federal budget or saving money. It's a flimsy pretext for purging every person and program not ideologically aligned with the incoming administration.
Would anyone like to bet whether the national debt will be lower in 2029?
God, if it's a purge, I hope someone has a "corrupt government contractor" index fund out there I can throw whatever severance I'll get in so I can at least hope to have a retirement.
How is #metoo equivalent having a series of private citizens sideline officials in every government department, including the Treasury, to get access to federal administrative and financial databases to unilaterally conduct mass layoffs [0] and give the president ammunition for whatever funding fight he's going to have with states next?
And promise to suspend normal conflict-of-interest rules in a completely unfunded deferred resignment offer?
And forcing senior civil servants to resign throughout all departments and agencies, including firing checks-and-balances mechanisms like Inspectors General while they're at it?
[0] It looks like OPM is targeting at least a 30% reduction in workforce this year.
That's certainly the country (or at least the stock markets) as a whole. I'm not sure whether individual agencies – like the FBI(*) or the Inspector Generals – will ever get what integrity they had back.
(*) I say this as someone who thinks COINTELPRO was a key example of a law enforcement agency getting high off its fumes and shredding human rights, of which the list is endless.
The 'brand' of the FBI is worthless. For half of the country it was investigating the criminal.
For the other half of the country it is the result of the purge.
No-one will trust the FBI from here on out.
Need to delete it and re-create the function with a different name.
Anyone who thinks the government should be "run like a business" does not deserve to be given an ounce of serious consideration in any sphere of intellectual discourse. A business does not get to print profit.
Aristotle explained (in Politics) why running government like a business is a bad idea. Sometimes it feels that we are forgetting what we have learned and have to re-learn it the hard way again and again.
Most of my interactions with government take place with state and local governments and they are definitely not allowed to print profit as far as I recall.
Public schools, police departments, parks, streets - I interact with these more than any other government service and no of them can print their own money and most of them work really hard to be run like businesses that care deeply about budgets and managing costs.
This is what we call a strawman in the business, as I'm clearly referring to the federal government. Yet, none of your examples should be run as a business either. They should be run as nonprofits. Not many nonprofit CEO oligarchs wreaking havoc in the government these days are there?
The same people who think it should be run like a business are wholly opposed to running it as a planned economy, even though each company in the US is a little totalitarian state with a completely planned economy.
Federal discretionary (non military) spending in 2023 was around $917 Billion. Of that, $131 Billion was Veteran Benefits, and $100 Billion was Health related. That leaves $686 Billion. [0]
Total US GDP in 2023 was $27.3 Trillion...so around 2.5% of total GDP.
GDP grows (inflation adjusted) around 2.3% per year.
US Health Care is 17-18% of US GDP.
So while federal discretionary spending is important, it's not nearly as important as keeping growth up, and getting a handle on health costs.
I give it a higher chance of succeeding in saving money while at the same time destroying a lot of things and creating problems that will take decades to fix.
>The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic.
That's not the case really. In the last 50 years there was no trend in federal spending vs GDP, with widest movements being a growth from ~19% in FY2001 (which ended with 09/11) to almost 25% in 2009, with subsequent decline to the same average as before. Nothing catastrophic. In the immediate postwar era of course, the spending has been much lower at around 15% but that was when the population was 9 years younger and no Medicare or Medicaid existed, i.e. old or poor sick people were just left to fend for themselves.
In 2024 out of 6.8T in federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid was 1.9T. Remove that and you are back to a typical 1950s level of 16-17% federal spending to GDP.
In theory, it should grow faster than GDP. Because government spending is inefficient but it is able to do things that the free market can't, so poor/less developed country should try to minimise it to enable fast, efficient growth, while a rich country should try to achieve the best results for everyone and that is done through government spending (fast growth is impossible anyway because it's done by adopting someone else' technology and when you are already the richest it's not possible as yours is the best one - fast growth is a catch-up growth).
In addition, it becomes inevitable because with high per capita GDP there is a lot of excess income which people want to invest because their needs are covered, and varying outcomes of those investments (even if purely random, by chance), tend to compound, which results in entrenched, systemic inequality, that might even crystallise into caste system. Only way to counteract it is more taxes and more government spending, so that there's less excess income left to invest, and outcomes of those less lucky are compensated by gov spending.
Step 2: Yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal
Step 3: It's a good thing, actually
I feel like this thread has fast tracked the steps.
I don't mean this to be insulting. I think you actually bring up interesting points. But perhaps could have not led off with step 1 and started with this.
Well that was more or less my initial point. Yes from 1950, spending has increased but it did so by introducing beneficial things like Medicare or Medicaid, and vastly more people under Social Security because of demographic transition. So it wasn't a bad thing. And after 1975, spending didn't increase much or at all. While it could and probably should have, to bring in more equality and improve quality of life for everyone.
But why should taxes scale GDP per capita? Growth means more production, controlled for inflation. Are citizens getting several times more services and goods from the government. It certainly doesn't seem like it. We dont have 10x more teachers per student, 10x more police, or 10x more public roads per capita.
Because if GDP per capita increases cost for services as well as number of required services increases.
Take a car analogy, if the GDP per capita increases such that the number of people who can afford a car doubles, the government will have to invest more in roads. Moreover the expectations to the quality of the roads will likely increase as well. In other words if more stuff gets done in a country your more likely to night more infrastructure and services to support it.
how does that make sense. My claim is that the government is collecting more taxes than ever. 1,000% more than in 1940 (controlling for inflation). I ask why we are getting so little for that.
We should be demanding more from our government! Instead, one side is trying to tear it down, and purposely fights to make government worse so people want to tear it down.
I think that framing is close. One side doesn't think the government can do better. I'm usually in that camp. I don't think the federal government can do better. It is too far from the voters for oversight. The country is too big and diverse for what it is trying to do.
My dream government is that of Switzerland, which keeps the purse close to the people.
>Secondly, why does the government need to spend to match GDP? The more productive we are, the more the government spends?
I have been harping on this for years
Tax as a percent of the economy has gone through the roof, both as a percent of GDP, and as inflation adjusted dollars.
If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.
Is the government providing 10X more services per capita? Do we have 10X the schooling? 10X the police? 10X the roads?
These numbers are already scaled for both inflation and population, so it should actually productivity.
Musk et al.'s plan has been out in the open for a while. Lots of interviews and opinions from them the last few years, so I wouldn't even consider it an open secret.
Even if they managed to find 100% savings in the spending they are targeting, they will not make a dent in the budget. Doing that and cutting all military spending would not balance the budget. Most Federal discretional spending is on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.
I'm all for cutting this, reducing benefits to current recipients to bring spending to sustainable levels, but to date I haven't found a politician to vote for who endorsed this position.
> Even if they managed to find 100% savings in the spending they are targeting, they will not make a dent in the budget. Doing that and cutting all military spending would not balance the budget. Most Federal discretional spending is on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.
How is social security discretion spending? It's tied to what has put into it, i.e. much more like a trust fund as I understand it.
> The average SS recipient receives more in benefits than they contributed. (including reasonable interest).
This is unsustainable. The people running it know and have known this for decades, instead of fixing it they have been at work finely tuning everything to ensure that the boomers receive full benefits just before major overhauls are require, significant additional taxes and/or reductions in benefits are 100% a guarantee at this point, but they continue spending and even increasing benefits all the while. A quarter century ago, Al Gore suggested putting a small amount of money aside to fund the program in the future and everyone laughed at him, on both the left and right. Instead they cut themselves stimulus checks and went to the mall, kicking off a decade of indulgence that ended with the 2008 global financial crisis while spending 7 trillion pounding sand in Iraq and Afghanistan with no particular goal and little to nothing to show for it.
This generation has acted like overgrown children their entire adult lives, they've spent and borrowed and kicked every can in sight down the road. They rigged this program along with every other as another massive transfer of wealth from the generations with the least money to the one with the most. As a final FU to future generations, they are as we speak in the process of dismantling the global world order that has protected and enriched them for their entire lives. I hope in the near future they will at last see some retribution for all of this.
I'm sure I've already made tons of not so friendlies in this thread, why not more.
Why not just cut and run on social security? I've paid in my whole life and probably won't even take a cent from it. We realize it's a mostly unsustainable ponzi scheme dependent on huge population growth that nobody wants, why not just tell us 'sorry, your money is gone, we're ending the program'?
Single payer I'm all for. Just in case you thought I was picking a side :).
There's no appetite for this for the exact same reason social security was created in the first place. Without it you have a bunch of senior citizens out on the street unable to work and unable to afford basic necessities.
For all the gnashing of teeth on "entitlement spending" the reality without it is pretty unpalatable to most.
There is a disconnect with how big we are and what infrastructure is needed to support it. Let's say we cut everything but Senate, House, President, VERY basic defense. Our military is larger than probably anything else. I think the naivety is hilarious. Our employees and government bloat is big because our nation is big. There is no way around this. It's time to impeach, Trump. Good night.
but with sledgehammer comes the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I mean, i understand the need to remove unnecessary costs like DEI etc, but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
What i dont like is how trump is looking to (or is being manipulated to) move a lot of public spending into private entities. For example, the recent ai stargate announcements. How is the public spending meant to benefit all americans, rather than the few that own those companies?
> I mean, i understand the need to remove unnecessary costs like DEI etc, but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
So you don’t believe there should be an attempt to reckon with the structural forces in play since the beginning of the country that have systematically lowered the wealth for Black Americans, trans and queer Americans, disabled Americans, neurodiverse Americans, and immigrant Americans?
>What i dont like is how trump is looking to (or is being manipulated to) move a lot of public spending into private entities.
Hey you finally found the Bailey. The DEI arguments were just to win your vote. Aka the Motte.
He woulda said he'd fix whatever you hated to get your vote. Now we gave him the keys to the castle and gets what he's always wanted. What the richest people who donated to him always wanted.
> but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
But it seems to me that DEI has so pervasively infiltrated the academy and scientific community, that excising them is extremely hard without drastic measures.
There was an open letter in 2020 summer from a lot of "prominent scientists" that claimed that suddenly social distancing didn't matter because BLM. I think that any such people that are viewing the world trough this lenses shouldn't touch federal money on account of being idiotically political or egregiously stupid.
>While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid, there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes.
Does it?
>White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.
>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.
Do you think that anyone that has put his name under such idiotic sentence deserves state money in any form - except payments under ADA?
I for one am curious how this turns out. I give it an 80% chance of failing spectacularly, 20% chance of 'wow, we were wasting that much money?'
The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic. It doesn't -feel- like much has ever been done to address it.
Well, now someone decided to just sledgehammer the whole thing. I'm both horrified and hopeful at what comes from that.