In his enthusiastic efforts to increase the government's “efficiency,” Elon Musk almost certainly violated a wide variety of federal laws, but has taken Congress's legitimate authority over spending.
Donald Trump's top donor – not elected to any office or confirmed to the cabinet location – closed the International Development Organization (USAID), a governmental agency codified by Congress in 1998. did. Government Efficiency (DOGE) had no legal authority to do so. Federal agencies cannot be dissolved without Congressional actions. He did anyway.
Musk also has access to the Treasury payment system and suggests he wants to cancel payments he considers waste or fraud.
Meanwhile, Doge has left a large number of civil servants on administrative leave for a seemingly illegal violation of the protection of civil servants mandated by Congress. And he offered virtually every federal worker the acquisition in exchange for resignation, according to legal experts.
“A lot of these things are so illegal, I think you're playing quantitative games and you're assuming that the system can't respond to all of this illegality at once,” Georgetown Law School's Administrative Law. Professor David Super said. Mask's plot in a Tuesday interview with the Washington Post.
To justify this illegality, mask advocates cite the urgency of dealing with the US debt crisis. In their narrative, the cost of inflating the federal deficit is so high that Doge's extraordinary measures must be tolerated.
“We're growing at a fast pace in national debt of $36 trillion,” billionaire investor Bill Ackman posted Tuesday. “Therefore, all Americans need to hear their voices loudly and clearly about how much they support Doge, Elon and the President's efforts to help our country. We cannot make Doge fail as our nation is rapidly on the road to bankruptcy.”
There are many reasons to reject this argument. The United States will not be “insolvent” anytime soon. And maintaining the rule of law is likely more important to our country's long-term well-being than reducing federal spending.
But the most fundamental problem in Ackman's position is that Doge has done nothing to meaningfully reduce America's long-term debt.
Musk and Trump have little interest in either a major cut in Social Security and Medicare, or a dramatically increasing tax. However, the main drivers of the federal deficit are tax cuts and rising costs of retirement and funding for healthcare needs for older Americans.
The Trump administration has no plans to deal with this reality. On the contrary, the president's fiscal proposal would add $7.75 trillion to citizen debt over the next decade, according to estimates from the Responsibility Budget Committee.
Meanwhile, Doge focuses on eradicating waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending. However, it is not mathematically impossible to offset the expenditures and tax cuts on qualifications by eliminating such waste (and it is easier than to say identifying fraudulent or unnecessary payments in advance). is).
Musk claims that there is $1.7 trillion in annual waste and fraud, without evidence. This is a number that roughly matches the size of the federal deficit. But when Doge actually tried to give specific examples of “wasteful” spending, it provided a program where budgetary expenses could be negligible.
We must not sacrifice the Constitution at the altar of deficit reduction. But that's not even the deal Doge is offering implicitly. Rather, Musk's team is asking us to break federal law. Very few Trim Federal Expenditures – Before Trump's tax cuts increase the deficit by trillions.
The deficit is rising not because awakened bureaucrats are blindly taking us, but because America is getting old
The federal government loses a significant amount each year due to inappropriate payments and fraud. According to a 2023 report from the Government's Accountability Office (GAO), the government overpayments of $200 billion in 2022. GAO estimates that the government will reduce more than $233 billion a year to fraud.
This is a considerable amount. And the Trump administration has found a way to make both numbers zero. That would be a great result.
The real driving force behind the rise in America's debt is the escalating costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
However, detecting fraud and overpayments is not easy. And disrupting the federal workforce makes these tasks even more challenging.
More essentially, fraud and overpayment are not the reasons why American debt will be rapidly burdened in the coming decades.
The absolute magnitude of national debt speaks less of its sustainability. What matters is how much our country owe it to individual investors (after deducting government assets) and the overall size of the economy.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), that ratio is on track to score around 18% points over the next decade. This increase is not the result of a steady rise in “waste” or “abuse.” In fact, our economy is poised to grow faster all CBO forecasts show discretionary spending over the next 10 years. As a result, such spending will not contribute to any contribution to the imminent increase in the US debt-to-GDP ratio.
The real driving force behind the rise in America's debt is the escalating costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Today, these programs combine financial prices of over $3 trillion per year.
However, their annual costs are poised to rise sharply in the coming decades for two reasons. First, as the vast baby boomer generation continues to age, the majority of Americans will collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, with a smaller share paying them. Second, older people need more healthcare services, so healthcare costs are poised to grow faster than the economy.
This does not necessarily mean that the United States must cut the public interest of seniors. For one thing, if Congress never enacted a tax cut under George W. Bush and Trump, the US debt-to-GDP ratio would be declining today. In other cases, the US could be comfortable running a significant increase in debt burden, especially if technological advancements minimize future inflation.
but if You believe 1) America should establish trillions of dollars with new tax cuts and 2) National debt is a serious issue, and there is no alternative to reducing social security and Medicare, as the Trump administration argues.
Doge's wasteful spending example is a small portion of the federal deficit
Of course, Trump has vowed not to cut Social Security and Medicare. And Musk suggests that Doge can resolve the expected debt crisis through the elimination of waste and fraud. However, unless he believes that Social Security payments are a form of wasteful spending, this is simply not the case.
In fact, Musk's own example of wasteful public programs shows that such spending has a small impact on national debt. This week, Doge provided conservative outlets with a list of useless, abusive projects that USAID has implemented. According to Fox News, these programs collectively are “millions of dollars.”
However, trimming “millions” from a $6.75 trillion federal budget has no meaningful impact on America's long-term debt trajectory. The fact that the US gave Peruvian artists $32,000 to Peruvian artists who work with “featuring LGBTQ+ heroes to address social and mental health issues” may regret it , maybe not. However, such spending has no relation to our country's financial health.
Furthermore, the administration clearly appears to have misunderstood some of the programs. They are trying to make them look more frivolous than they actually are. FoxNews pointed out that one policy is described as funding Egypt's “tourism” but in fact “contains drinking water and wastewater provision. Hundreds of thousands of yen in North Sinai Service to people.
This is not the first time that one of Doge's outrageous examples of federal spending has failed to survive scrutiny. Previously, the Associated Press claimed that the US spent $50 million on condoms in the Gaza Strip.
Musk recently cited several concrete examples of wasted spending outside the realm of foreign aid. But these also had price tags of millions. Musk, for example, lamented that the government offered 37 FDA employees a subscription to Politico Pro for a total cost of $517,855. It is unclear whether this spending should appear to be wasted. PoliticoPro is an outstanding trade publication that provides unique information on policy and governance issues, and therefore is why countless lobbying groups pay. But whatever you consider a policy, cancelling such a subscription essentially does nothing to offset the costs of Trump's imminent tax cuts.
In fact, the Trump administration has not given us any reason to believe they care about reducing citizen debt. Brian Reedle, a fiscal conservative at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, wrote Tuesday: Or save $3 billion in federal workforce cuts from a $700 billion budget. It's not when Trump and Congress are preparing to add $800 billion a year to the proposed new tax cuts and spending. ”
The question isn't whether he's trying to give Elon Musk unconstitutional power so that he can save America from the debt crisis. Rather, whether he wants to give him such power so that he can bend the government to his whim (salvage billions in federal contracts from administrative states that he has reshaped so much that he cannot explain it) while continuing).
