However, is it right to be hiring so many new people when we are $36T in debt, with the debt growing $1T every 100 days. It seems like this was going to happen at some time and the original sin was to expand headcount when debt is already this high.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...
For the record, I personally am completely against the tax cuts.
These cuts to the workforce are performative at best, or designed to destroy the federal government at worst. Given it's Musk and Trump, I think it's the later. And they are doing this under the guise of budget concerns, which is clearly bullshit when they still have a $4.5T tax cut on the table.
So it's not whataboutism, it's was a quick way of highlighting how your post was incorrect.
So no they don’t care about costs. Its about sucking all the government money for themselves :)
And the NSF headquarters is a complete joke...I use to do tempo runs down Eisenhower Ave when it was all brutalist government buildings and condo's. They ripped down the brutualist buildings and rebuilt them into commercial office space which has sat vacant for years. But then in comes the NSF and they constructed this abomination of a building that has rooftop gardens and dominates the skyline. Massive sky scrapper...And they did this when a significant portion of their employee's worked from home (I know one). Sorry if I'm not crying about layoffs with the NSF, especially after years of tech layoffs due to Section 174 (approved of by some of these same progressive NSF government employees).
> new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week.
To repeat: Biden admin signed those contracts and they were last updated in December. So not new, not last week, not a deal with Trump admin.
> Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA
No. DOGE, which is a government department of ~100 people, will work to fix FAA, not SpaceX. And you don't have to use scary quotes: by their own admission traffic control system is tech from 70.
Finally, why don't you tell us which SpaceX government contract should be given to another company and how much more will that other company charge (assuming they are even capable of executing the task).
No tax dollars should go to Nazis. We have grandparents dead on the beach of Normandy.
State Department cut the Tesla deal that Biden signed.
Mass firing your best workers is not a great way to build a more efficient government.
- Social Security: 21%
- Medicare: 15%
- Defense: 14%
- Interest: 13%
The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched, no one's been talking seriously about defense spending cuts, and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. So almost 2/3 of our 6.8T budget is off limits. The 10B for the whole NSF is like < 0.15%.
I'd love us to have a serious conversation about addressing the debt, but that can't start with asking for tax cuts and protecting existing entitlement benefits under their exact current terms.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Yeah… maybe:
> "We're even looking at Treasuries," Trump said. "There could be a problem - you've been reading about that, with Treasuries and that could be an interesting problem."
> He added: "It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought."
> It was not clear whether Trump was referring to debt service or other government payments made by the Treasury Department.
* https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-...
That's also in the 2024 Republican party platform: "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE". (Shouting copied from the source).
There are however a couple reasons to doubt the sincerity of that.
First the Republican Study Committee, which around 80% of House Republicans belong to, keeps proposing that the retirement age be raised.
Second, if nothing is done to either cut benefits or raise revenue or both the Social Security trust fund runs out of money around 2035. Around 20% of benefits are paid out of the trust fund. If that is allowed to happen then the only way to not cut benefits would be for Congress and the President to make that up out of the general budget.
The only thing Republicans have said along the lines of increasing SS revenue is that their policies will lead to so much economic growth that tax revenue, including the payroll taxes for SS, will go way up and that will be enough to avert the trust fund's insolvency.
Meanwhile, many of their proposed tax cuts will shorten the time to insolvency. The proposal to eliminate taxes on tips and to eliminate taxes on SS for retirees with high non-SS income will move the insolvency up by up to a couple years or so.
Anyway, I'm sure that if the trust fund is allowed to become insolvent those who let that happen will say that since they did not actively cut benefits they did not violate the party platform.
The Democrats also have repeatedly introduced bills to address the trust fund, which concentrate on raising its revenue. The main method in these bills is to raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Right now you pay 6.2% on the first $176100 (in 2025) of your pay. The Democrat proposals are to include some income above that cap in payroll tax. I believe there have been proposals to get rid of that cap, to raise the cap, or to put a cap on that cap (e.g., payroll tax on first $176100, then no payroll tax from there to $400k, then payroll tax again on income above $400k).
A poll of a proposal that would do the cap on the cap thing (with the numbers given above), gradually raise the payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.2%, make the annual COL adjustment more accurately reflect inflation, and a few other things which would result in there being a small surplus got overwhelming support from voters [1] (here's the PDF with the detailed results) [2].
Overall support is 82%. This doesn't vary much by education level or income level or age. By party affiliation support is 88% for Democrats, 82% for independents, and 74% for Republicans.
Note: the above results are for a proposed package that includes several things. The poll also looked at the individual things in isolation and at variants of them.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/
[2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/19/...
Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government.
Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion.
If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed.
Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research.
It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.
This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them.
Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.
The NSF generates much more value than it costs.
~1% federal workforce growth since 2000: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...
Federal employment numbers since 1940: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... (peaks are temporary census hires)
spending over time as a % of GDP: https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025
Inflation adjusted federal spending (~4% growth): https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-federal-budget-cha...
US real GDP over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/
The attrition rate of the federal government is 6-7% per year. This is about 150,000 new hires a year if you maintain the same size government. You can even see it from the DOGE website showing hundreds of thousands
So yes, the vast majority are new employees. The idea that the government hasn't grown doesn't mean that new employees haven't been hire.
I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. It doesn't have to be demeaning the way it's currently being done, but the 8 month offer was pretty generous in my opinion.
Or maybe you are wildly off base about how many humans it takes to corral the federal government of the US? Maybe you are more filled with propaganda of government jobs?
Maybe the people like you making government jobs the butt of jokes have been part of the problem? Maybe we should respect civil service and have high expectations of it but also understand how important it is.
Being mildly in debt is no reason or excuse to destroy democracy.
$36T is mildly in debt? 50% of our tax revenue will be used to pay our interest on the debt in the next 5 years. It sounds like you have no understanding about how much debt we are in, especially considering that most of our debt has been bought by the Federal Reserve, which is essentially printing money.
Nothing about this destroys democracy. Managing our debt and spending allows us to enjoy more democracy not less.
It's almost as if it's just a boogeyman they trot out when they're the opposition party, and not the thing they're actually concerned about.
You have to start somewhere and they're starting with the low hanging fruit. They've already gotten permission to go though the defense budget as well.