Trump Needs Real Budget Slashing, Not Musk’s DOGE Smoke and Mirrors

Because the United States has a debt of almost $37 trillion, with government interest payments exceeding the massive amount spent on the military annually, substantial tax increases or deep cuts in spending are needed to reduce it.

Yet, the Republicans in the administration and Congress seem to be planning the opposite, a massive tax cut of $4.5 trillion with grossly optimistic spending reductions of $2 trillion. Over time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the debt will explode a whopping $23 trillion more to rest at $60 trillion.

The theatrical, overstated, arbitrary and bumbling Muskian DOGE budget “slashing” of contracts, programs and agencies (for example, the Agency for International Development) is only a drop in the bucket of an annual federal budget of $6.75 trillion. If Elon Musk and his acolytes fired every federal government civilian employee, it would cut only 3 percent of the federal budget. Most government expenses are for programs, not people.

Populists on the right have long decried progressive virtue signaling, but Musk is now doing the same thing with his haphazard and inept budget-cutting approach. Although not cutting that much, he has raised the hackles of the Democratic and Republican big spenders to defend their programs in the actual show: the congressional appropriations process.

During his first term, Donald Trump, famous for bragging about “spending other people’s money,” added annual debt at twice the rate of the progressive Barack Obama. So, why the sudden change of heart? Trump’s allowing of the Muskian DOGE is merely an attempt to satisfy those populists in his base who want to “deconstruct the administrative state” and portray himself to the public as a budget hawk to mask the hefty added debt that his fiscal policies—huge tax cuts without paying for them with equal spending reductions—will be wrought.

DOGE is just the usual government pretending to do something about a particular problem by well-publicized but modest results. One analogous case of “for show” government efforts happened during George W. Bush’s post-9/11 War on Terrorism when more layers of sluggish government bureaucracy—the creation of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security—were added to implausibly demonstrate that the government was improving coordination to fight agile terrorist groups. Similarly, in Barack Obama’s administration, he said expanding government intervention into the already overregulated healthcare industry by passing Obamacare would somehow combat the effects of the Great Recession.

Worse, DOGE’s unilateral (without congressional sanction) and haphazard spending freezes and firings of civil service employees are likely illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution instructs that all federal spending will be approved by Congress. DOGE is cutting existing spending that has already been enshrined into law by congressional passage and presidential signing. Undoing this without more congressional passing and executive signing is clearly unconstitutional, not to mention arbitrary. It is akin to illegal presidential impoundment of funds or an unconstitutional (as ruled by the Supreme Court) executive line-item veto of particular expenditures in a broader appropriations bill.

Such refusal to spend money that has already been legally approved undermines Congress’s most important power—the power of the purse—and exceeds the presidential power questionably imagined in the Republican unitary theory of the executive. This theory, an ahistorical 20th-century creation, speciously asserts that Congress cannot impede the president’s firing of independent agency heads, thus giving the president unitary control over the executive branch.

Implicitly, this theory would allow the chief executive to fire agency employees under Civil Service protection, which has been the law of the land since the late 1800s, and more widely will enable the president to flout any congressional laws or federal court rulings that would impede his absolute control over the executive branch.

Contrary to popular belief, the Constitution does not enshrine a separation of powers but rather separate branches of government that should share powers: the war, treaty, appointment, and legislative (including appropriation) powers, etc., between the president and Congress. In addition, at the beginning of the republic, the Department of Treasury was supposed to answer to the president and Congress. President George Washington was careful not to intrude too deeply into the department’s activities.

Also, for much of the republic’s early history, each federal department negotiated its budget with the appropriate congressional committees in the House and Senate without much input from the White House. There has never been unitary control over the executive branch. The nation’s Founders intended that Congress pass laws—many governing executive branch actions—and the president sign, follow and enforce them.

Instead of allowing DOGE to illegally create chaos in government operations by cutting what it wants on a whim and violating existing laws, the administration already has significant influence, with majorities in both houses of Congress, on the congressional budgetary process, which has already begun for next year and ensures the rule of law by legally appropriating federal money.

So, why doesn’t it wait a short time to use regular processes to make significant budget cuts? Because, I fear, the whole purpose of DOGE is to attempt an unconstitutional power grab of epic proportions.