Douglas: Can the DOGE Brothers cut federal spending by $2 trillion?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have set a laudable goal of cutting the federal budget by $2 trillion dollars.  With the national debt at $36 trillion and last year’s deficit spending at $1.8 trillion, getting there will be a challenge for the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE.

The mantra has been to save money by cutting the federal workforce. There are 2,300,000 civilians working for the federal government. The bulk of them work in defense and homeland security jobs. Air Force, Army, Navy, and DOD make up a total of 762,882 jobs, the VA 468,552 and Homeland Security 222,539.  Those three areas alone total about 65% of the government workforce.  All other areas of the government make up the other 846,000 jobs.

The big target is always the Department of Education. If you abolish all of it root and branch, you only shed 4,425 jobs, or a tiny drop in a big bucket. You also have to figure out what to do with half of its budget — $274 billion in loans and grants to college students.

Abolish all federal jobs outside of the uniformed armed services and you can save $213 billion as of March 2024. That still leaves you with about 90% to find towards the $2 trillion savings mark. So where is the bulk of the money in the federal government going?  It goes to us, dear Reader. Transfer payments. The Treasury collects taxes, borrows $1.8 trillion and then cuts checks for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, veterans’ benefits, etc.  Also $880 billion goes to pay interest to those buying bonds from the Treasury to keep this sinking ship afloat.

Those money-in and money-out transfer payments to us are in the amount of $4.1 trillion of the total spending of $6.75 trillion.  The $4.1 trillion in spending is on auto pilot known as “mandatory spending,” that supposedly can’t be cut.

Want to save $2 trillion?  The quickest way is to abolish Social Security and Medicare. Of course, 65,000,000 people will rise up in arms.

Add in the 88,000,000 people on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (or CHIP) and you can see why President-elect Trump has taken all of these programs away from DOGE.

This does not mean Musk and Ramaswamy can do nothing.  Fresh eyes on this massive thing called the federal government are long overdue.  But quick simple answers are not there for the picking as the above numbers reflect.

We should all wish them well, but they should prepare for a marathon and not a sprint.

Chuck Douglas is a former Republican congressman from New Hampshire who lives in Pembroke.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Douglas: Can the DOGE Brothers cut federal spending by $2 trillion?

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