DOGE's Cost-Cutting Won't Do Much to Lower the Annual Debt
Published: Friday, May 9, 2025
The following is from Alan Guebert, a freelance agricultural journalist from Illinois.
Somewhere along life's highway most of us learned to balance a checkbook. This task usually involved a pencil, the back of a used envelope and some basic math. Today, however, a click or two in a second or two delivers that up-to-the-second number.
It's the same for the federal government's checkbook; a click or two takes you inside the nation's ledger courtesy of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Once there, you'll find an electronic book filled with page-after-unbalanced page of spending.
In FY2024, for example, federal spending was $6.75 trillion while federal revenue was $4.9 trillion. That left a $1.8 trillion shortfall to be covered by someone other than U.S. taxpayers—mostly buyers of U.S. Treasury securities.
In a word, debt.
The GOP-led Congress and the White House say they will erase this red ink first by cutting "waste, fraud and abuse" and, second, by taking a sharp cleaver to federal spending.
DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, was (somehow) created and sent to tackle the waste, fraud and abuse side. After an ambitious—if mostly illegal—start, it cut back its cutting from an estimated $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion. Most DOGE watchers now say the likely sum is closer to $50 billion.
If it's indeed $50 billion, the back of my envelope shows that DOGE's fine tooth comb will find only .0074% of all 2024 federal spending wasteful, fraudulent or abusive. If $150 billion is accurate, that number would climb to a still microscopic .022% of all federal spending.
Those percentages of waste, fraud or abuse—even though they represent billions in federal spending—would be the envy of every American corporation, farm and family.
Moreover, DOGE's meager findings will never cover an annual debt approaching $2 trillion. That requires deep spending cuts, not pennies scrounged from sofa cushions.
Several GOP congressional members have budget-slashing ideas, but few (and, to be fair, even fewer Dems) target the biggest federal programs: Social Security that spent $1.5 trillion in 2024, the Pentagon ($850 billion), Medicare ($865 billion), Medicaid ($618 billion) and the interest on debt ($881 billion).
That means that at least 70% of current federal spending is off limits to budget cutters of either party.
Which leaves a small slice of the federal pie to supply most of the cuts. That skinny wedge includes child tax credits, food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC, unemployment insurance, and popular ag programs like crop insurance, EQIP and CRP.
Now add a new $4 trillion tax cut the GOP-led Congress and the White House want plus Trump campaign promises to exempt Social Security, tips and earned overtime from federal income taxes. Taken together, that entire wish list will add an estimated $9.1 trillion to the federal deficit in the coming decade.
And as that debt is piling up, anticipated tax revenue stalls.
According to the CBO, 2024 federal income taxes totaled $2.4 trillion, payroll taxes (mostly Social Security) equaled $1.7 trillion, corporate income taxes were $530 billion, and all other taxes like tariffs and estate taxes accounted for just $253 billion.
Combined, 2024 federal tax revenue covered just 74% of all federal spending.
That means there's no envelope big enough, no pencil sharp enough, and no math clever enough to balance an already built-in 25% deficit against a slowing revenue stream and an even bigger flood—$9 trillion—of additional debt coming in the next decade.
Anyone who says otherwise is either a politician or someone who has never balanced a checkbook. But, as Mark Twain might growl, I repeat myself.
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