That should be the headline, and then an explanation of why those probably aren't even real savings (e.g. cost of payouts to fired workers).
If DOGE savings are one-off then it would be fair to present alternatives according to their lifetime debt impact, since the presented DOGE numbers would already be "lifetime."
And TFA states "Please note: only grants and contracts posted on the doge.gov website with receipts are counted towards the total saving value. For this reason, the total savings value on the doge.gov website may appear larger, however due to the lack of supporting receipts, this value is unverifiable." So it looks like DOGE's recurring savings are (mostly?) not included here since they are undocumented.
How much are they costing us?
Overseas we’re watching DOGE with a giant bucket of popcorn on our lap, but it’s not going to change our government policies towards the USA.
tldr; spending is higher, deficit is higher
With only some moderate rate increases to taxes on business and top earners along with moderate spending cuts I was able to create a plan that reduced the deficit by 25% over 10 years without screwing over the poor and middle class.
When will a total Federal Government Simulator game be released?
1. Health care services (About 33%)
2. Social Security and other transfer payments (About 25%) (EITC, SNAP, housing subsidies, etc)
3. Defense (About 15%)
4. Interest on the debt (About 11%).
There's simply not all that much to cut from everything else. Each of those areas also has a giant constituency that will fight cuts.
If I had to give an area where you could probably cut the most, it would be health care, but that has proven to be a very thorny problem.
A billion dollars is still a billion freaking dollars.
I encounter the same attitude sometimes with program optimization too. Sometimes it’s death by a thousand cuts and you just need to shave off 0.1% at a time until your program is fast.
There's also the question of what is actual savings versus what is going to end up costing us more in the long run. You can save money in your personal budget by cancelling oil changes on your car, but that doesn't represent a real long-term savings. In fact quite the opposite.
Things like the National Parks produce huge amounts of economic activity in the surrounding communities. Things like food safety regulations and testing promote consumer confidence in our food and agricultural industries. Social Security money not sent to seniors or children of deceased parents places a larger burden on our communities. Not every cut is a savings, and the information being given about what has been cut across all of these agencies has been less than stellar.
If you don't actually care about the deficit, then ya; just gut a ton of minuscule social services that add up to <1% of the budget but can be touted to your base as "political wins" while actually kneecapping American scientific competitiveness.
[1]: https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/what-does-the-feder... [2]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
These people are idiots.
To take it even further, you could group current annual revenue sources by individual/business/transaction based revenue/taxes and then determine unit burden for the different kinds of units. I think that would lead to a more illuminating analysis and set a framework for a potentially more revelatory discovery process.
I expect that Trump's second term is going to massively balloon the deficit just like most Republican presents have since Reagan.
You are not alone in this assumption, they've made it clear from the outset via Project 2025. They want to dismantle the government and sell it off to their friends.
It's a pity too, in that we should be continuously trying to make government more cost effective. It's one of the countless missteps of the Dems to not do this themselves (but in the right way: provide valuable services while trimming waste). Another misstep is in not educating the public on the value the public gets from the tax dollars spent.
I'm going to zero in on the issue with this. The way unions exist in the US is not conductive to smart reforms. We have structured labor relations in the US to be as hostile as possible which makes them as hard as possible. This was deliberate, going back to the Pinkerton era. Since certain standards were enacted that prevented violent strikebreaking, business owners needed an enemy, and by making these negotiations as fraught as possible, they are able to go to the public and thereby politicians, and plead their case about how damaging unions are to the economy, even though businesses themselves have conducted themselves in such a manner and supported legislation that makes it this way
Thereby, any attempts at reform - which will likely mean eliminating or retraining positions - typically only comes when all austerity measures come, which by then is too late or useful to be meaningful, and often due to reactionary and hurried processes of enactment, are not well thought out, trimming too much or too little and not much in between.
If we had a sane labor relations paradigm we could do more here and it would benefit everyone - the tax payer and the workers - without inducing undue harm.
This stretches into private industry as well. Labor relations are incredibly adversarial there too.
I do want to also point out, that the reason its this way is due to businesses (and by proxy, pro business politicians) being unwilling to compromise and fighting labor tooth and nail, even in 2025, which has set the historical tone for these situations. Had businesses been more reasonable during the Pinkerton era organized labor would be healthier than it is now for both sides.
If we had things like sectorial bargaining and a better overall organized labor system, I think the US wouldn't have such tension in achieving smart reforms
Murc’s law in action.
So it's also about spying.
Not blaming those foreign agencies. I'd do the same thing if the shoe was on the other foot.
But congrats. Get your laughs in now. The US will be back. We'll have our day. Just takes time, patience and studied observation. We have a long memory.
We have a long memory.
Also, many nations do have houses older than the US. My compliments to your ancient engineers. Time will tell how long ours will last. I would caution however that, unless I miss my guess, I suspect we both know ours will outlast the surrogates currently being used to leave digital gifts in our systems.
This is why the Culture War exists -- to stir up anger, hate, and fear and leverage that to sway voters.
I expect a wave of corporate consolidation happening soon across most sectors that will be driven by this outlook
They want to replace income taxes with tariffs, because rich people.
The last tax cut promised to create jobs but (surprised pikachu face) instead went to stock buybacks.