Having inspected myself in the mirror this morning, I am pleased to report that my hair remains utterly unruffled by Trump’s first Cabinet picks. You want to make an unqualified Fox News host the head one of the largest bureaucracies in the world? Have at it, my friend. You want an evangelical Christian rooting for the destruction of Jerusalem in order to usher in the End Times as the ambassador to Israel? By all means, my good man. You want to appoint asbestos to head up the EPA? Say no more.
Last week, I wrote that I am embracing the new Trump administration with arms wide open. Whatever they want to do is a-ok with this fella. My country voted for cruelty and incompetence; cruelty and incompetence are what we’re going to get. But wait, as the late-night television commercials once promised us, there’s more!
We also have the newly-minted, gratingly named Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE, gross), headed up by Elon Musk and his boy wonder, Vivek Ramaswamy. Apparently, these two are going to take a blowtorch to the federal government for purposes that remain unclear. Perhaps they’re chasing the ephemeral “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Super. Have at it, boys. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they’ve promised to excise two trillion dollars, which is a full third of our federal government spending.
That’s a lot of Doge.
In theory, I have no problem cutting the federal budget. In practice, however, it may not be so simple. I’ll be the first to admit that those guys are way smarter than me, or at least way better at appearing smart than me. So it’s entirely possible those very smart men have amazing ideas at the ready. I just don’t see what those ideas could be.
Let’s start with the Department of Education, which Trump has already promised to eliminate. In other words, the DoE appears to be DOA. Shuttering that Shrine to Waste and Abuse should get us a hell of a lot closer to meeting the goal, no?
What is the total operating budget for the entire Department of Education? In 2023, its entire budget was right around $220B, which sounds like a lot, but it’s only 1.8% of the federal budget. That sucks. Even if we get rid of the whole thing, we’ve barely made a dent. But what does the Department of Education actually do?
Of their total budget, about half is allocated to the Office of Federal Student Aid, whose role is to provide “grant, work-study, and loan funds to students attending college or career school.” That student loan you got to attend nursing school? This is where it came from.
As a nation, do we value the ability of citizens to secure loans for higher education? Does the government have a role to play? If not, we could fully privatize student loans. We could do that. But what would be the result?
My guess: higher total costs for students and a much higher rejection rate for loans among the less affluent. What are the consequences if fewer students are able to afford an already unaffordable secondary education? I’m not necessarily sure the consequences would be entirely terrible: for example, maybe colleges and universities will be forced to lower their costs if people can’t afford to attend. That would be good? Or maybe we just end up in a situation in which college, already exorbitantly priced, ends up becoming even more out of reach for millions of Americans.
What else does the Department of Education do besides host drag queen story hours? (They don’t host drag queen story hours.)
The next largest budget line I saw was for “The Office of Primary and Secondary Education.” Within that office, the largest item was for “Education for the Disadvantaged,” more commonly known as Title I. I’m always reading about various “Titles” in the federal budget and I have little idea what most of them do. Title I, established by LBJ in 1965, “provides financial assistance to school districts with a high percentage of students from low-income families.”
If we’re going to eliminate Title I, do we also want to do away with its stated goal of providing financial assistance to poor districts? Because it seems to me like that’s a worthwhile, and affordable, thing for the federal government to spend our money on. If we kill it, will some other agency going to step up and provide those services? If so, aren’t we just shuffling money around instead of cutting expenditures? Or do we just want to say that poor students are on their own?
Keep in mind, total Title I spending only accounts for about 10% of the Department of Education’s budget, so even when we get rid of it, we still haven’t cut very much. If we decide to keep Title I, we’re going to have to cut something else.
Maybe the next-largest budget item, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which helps provide funding for, as the name suggests, students in need of special ed and rehabilitative services. I mean, we’ve got to cut off somebody. It might as well be the most vulnerable, am I right? Chances are, a lot of those people don’t even vote!
Or, if we decide we probably should help out kids with special needs, we can just shift those costs to the states. They’ll probably pick up the slack, right? Do we trust Minnesota and Mississippi to provide the same level of care to their special needs residents?
I could go on, but why bother? The only way to make meaningful cuts to the budget are to concentrate on the big-ticket items: defense, interest on the debt, and welfare programs. If Elon and Vivek want to talk to their non-hand-washing, Fox News host friend who will be running the Department of Defense about how to shave military spending, by all means, do so. I suspect they won’t get very far. We can’t stop payment on the national debt without destroying our economy. So that leaves Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
While Elon and Vivek run around with scissors, Trump has promised further tax cuts, which will reduce government revenue, which will make it harder to eliminate deficit spending, which will increase the debt, which will increase payments to the debt. Etc. etc. etc.
So what do we do? Elon has already endorsed the idea of a “temporary hardship” Americans will feel when he gets his hands on the levers of power:
How much hardship did you vote for? Personally, I didn’t vote for any, but that’s because I am a well-known hedonist and bon vivant. I’m also not thrilled with making my fellow Americans suffer because of the whims of the richest man in the world. And yes, these are whims. Do Elon and Vivek think they are the first people who wanted to hack away the American budget?
People have been trying to tame our spending since we started spending. There was only one, brief period when American debt was entirely paid off. President Andrew Jackson, who called debt “the national curse” paid off the entirety of the nation’s $75m debt for the first, and only time, in our history. What happened in the years immediately following? In 1837, the nation entered its longest economic depression in history.
I read about that on the Planet Money website, and while they make the point that “no one is saying paying off the debt led to the depression,” if the goal of reducing the budget in order to pay off the debt and get the country back on stable financial footing, it doesn’t seem to have worked the one time it was tried. Shrug emoji.
As I said, I’m all for whatever the latest Trump cavalcade of clowns wants to do. Kick people out, beat people up, throw folks in jail. It’s all good by me. I’m just making the point that just because a guy can do one thing well doesn’t mean he can do another. On the other hand, Musk has done an admirable job of reducing the value of Twitter by 75%, so maybe he can do the same with our federal spending. I’ll just ask: is that really what you want?
Also, here’s the video for Money:
Let's be clear: trumpism is not about improving systems or structures, especially our Dept of Edu. It's in their best interests to keep the public as uneducated as possible--that's their idea of a "great" America.
doge was so funny I forgot to stop sobbing