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If you look at the budget, everything is "just pennies" yet somehow it's 2T deficit with 7T total expenditures. If you were to drill into the big programs (Medicare, Social Security, Defense, etc) there are thousands of programs nested within those.
Like it or not someone will need to do the hard work of going line-by-line and accumulating savings to make the budget make sense. There also needs to be a culture shift in gov't. It's not monopoly money---something obvious no?
DOGE exists to cut programs that the current administration does not like. Thats it. Its entirely political.
The fact that treasury allowed 4.7T to go out the door without a description or traceability should say enough.
Bottomline, there is a lot of nonsense going on.
Culture: One of my army buddies tells me that they must use up all the ammo at the end of the year so that they can request more budget the following year.
Government is clearly corrupt, we've just legalized (and normalized) graft. It's funny that the same people that criticized corporations about graft under Bush-era republicans, now believe that government programs are above reproach.
The whole budget is made up of pennies. It’s a lazy talking point to say they don’t matter and what’s even worse is the politicians see no issue with wasting pennies of tax payer money! Any waste should be condemned.
And like you said you’ll never balance the budget unless you go line by line. As a tax payer I’d love a balanced budget by getting a punch of pennies and keeping core programs the same versus cutting core programs because “it’s too hard” to look at the pennies.
Since we don’t have a definition for waste, going through finding it is an ideological exercise.
What you’re advocating for is an ideological purge for your team, but you wouldn’t be so excited if you didn’t agree with the ideology.
There is plenty of waste in the budget and “nice to have programs”. You only need to look at the list of things being cut.
And of course it’s ideological! People vote for a President with certain values and they follow those. It’s how it’s supposed to work.
> People vote for a President with certain values and they follow those. It’s how it’s supposed to work.
That is not according to the Constitution. The President's role is to faithfully implement the laws. All of them, including the ones he and his voters don't like. He doesn't get to declare laws null and void by not enforcing them. For instance, if voters elect a racist, that doesn't mean it's legal for POTUS to then not enforce civil rights laws.
You want my list? Critical government services. That’s it. Nothing more. I’m sure you won’t see the police, public health, state dept, as waste.
And Republicans were voted in on an agenda to cut this sort of stuff. So sure, it would be great to hold hands on this but that’s not how our system works.
And yes, Congress sets a budget and laws with very high level instructions. The President’s job is to implement.
So when the law says “Congress approves $50B for FEMA in order to provide Americans with disaster relief”, the President has discretion on what “implement disaster relief” looks like. And the President is not forced to spend money on waste or fraud.
So what happens if money is left over? Like all things in politics it comes down to the details. Maybe Trump brings his new budget back to Congress and tells them to pass a much smaller budget. Maybe it goes to court and a new pathway for returning funds is created. I don’t know.
But crying “Constitution crisis!” When the President, with all the powers of the Executive, decides on how to run the Executive (within the bounds of the law), is going to fall flat among voters, especially when the President actions are exactly what the voters asked for.
Nope, I want to defund all of that. I want 0 of my tax dollars going to that waste. Police is abuse. Public health is a fraud. State Department is waste. Our points of view are irreconcilable, we need a system to resolve our differences civilly.
> So sure, it would be great to hold hands on this but that’s not how our system works.
The totality of our laws and system of government were decided iteratively by majorities representing all sides at some point. The President doesn't get to come in and decide all the laws passed by Democrats in the past are "waste and fraud" which seems to be what he's trying to do. The way to change the law is to go through Congress, but of course changing the law is much harder than not implementing.
> Congress sets a budget and laws with very high level instructions. The President’s job is to implement.
His job according to the Constitution is to implement "faithfully", meaning it's not his will that he's carrying out, it's the will of Congress. We already have an IG system to give Congress feedback on whether the agencies are running how they see fit, but Trump just gutted that. That's not the behavior of someone faithfully implementing the laws for Congress, that's the behavior of someone implementing laws for himself.
> But crying “Constitution crisis!” When the President, with all the powers of the Executive
What they are doing is not one of the powers. The Constitution does not allow for this, the law does not allow for this either. They are breaking the law.
For about 99.9999% of those things there's no evidence they were wasteful or fraudulent. They just say they cut those and they claim they are wasteful and fraudulent. So far there has been very little, if any, evidence of that. There have been quite a few lies.
And on top pf that they cut actual critical programs like National Nuclear Security Administration (something they scrambled to undo) which shows that they have very little insight into what they do.
Have you… have you ever met a wealthy person?
Second, spending is done by Congress. If you don’t like the spending cut it through proper channels we don’t get to decide not to fund something once’s it’s been allocated.
All the cuts are going to the right place :)
All of DOGE is just "I don't like these programs, so I am going to call them waste". None of those programs are wasteful that you listed, you just don't like them. How about you substantiate how any of these programs are corrupt or wasteful.
The 2024 federal deficit was 1.8 trillion I am willing to bet a donation to GiveWell that 2025 will higher. You want to take the other side?
Also, you think that rich people won't use the government to get more money? Seriously?