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President Donald Trump’s executive orders require massive cuts to the federal budget, downsizing the federal workforce and weakening or dismantling critical federal agencies. The task of turning orders into policies has been outsourced to an unaccountable Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. DOGE, with Musk and Trump loyalists embedded in federal agencies, will recommend cuts and identify federal workers to be retained or dismissed based on political litmus tests.
Selling massive budget cuts to the U.S. people involves deception about actual motives and consequences. The first deception is that DOGE, which could be pronounced dodgy, is a government agency. It isn’t and Musk doesn’t have legal authority to do what he’s doing. Additionally, civilian federal employees and the agencies they work for are not instruments of a sinister “deep state” controlled by Democrats. They are part of an “administrative state” that relies on their skills and expertise to meet the needs of a complex democratic government and society. Only about 4,000 of the 2¼ million employees who make up the civilian federal workforce are political appointees. Rewarding skills and minimizing corrupting political patronage are central features of a thriving democracy.
Bureaucracies are imperfect but they are crucial to an administrative state that requires professionalism, monitoring, accountability and technological upgrades. These requirements are not the concerns of President Trump, or Musk, or DOGE, whose goals include stripping federal workers of legal protections, promoting authoritarian rule, increasing presidential power, expanding corporate influence, and removing checks and balances. Trump, confusing the presidency with kingship, unilaterally removed at least 17 (of 74) inspectors general whose principal responsibilities are to prevent fraud, waste and abuse, and to ensure efficiency within critical agencies.
A second deception involves the Trump administration positioning DOGE and massive budget cuts as necessary responses to the nation’s unsustainable debt while pursuing policies that dramatically increase the debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its 10-year budget outlook in January. The national debt is expected to rise by $23.9 trillion over the next decade, and that doesn’t include trillions of dollars of additional debt that will result from the Trump administration’s promised tax cuts.
A third deception involves DOGE promises to deliver massive budget cuts — Musk uses figures of $500 billion, $1 trillion, or $2 trillion — with minimal pain. Negative consequences are either ignored or celebrated as a way to hurt non-MAGA “woke” constituencies. Common citizens, whatever their political affiliation, are about to be fleeced by the billionaire class proposing these cuts.
In order to make sense of what is being cut and why, we need to understand the difference between discretionary and mandatory portions of the federal budget. Each year, Congress approves the discretionary budget that determines what agencies, priorities and services receive funding and how much they get. The mandatory portion of the budget consists of programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that, by law, must be paid. The total U.S. federal budget in 2023 was $6.2 trillion. The mandatory portion of the budget (including interest paid on the nation’s debt) was $4.5 trillion. The discretionary portion of the federal budget was $1.7 trillion. Insufficient tax revenue meant that fully funding the $6.2 trillion budget required borrowing $1.7 trillion, an amount equal to the entire discretionary budget. This added $1.7 trillion to the nation’s debt.