It’s not as if cutting Federal spending is some brand-new idea. It’s not as if nobody has noticed the Federal budget deficit before.
But if the current regime were serious about the budget deficit …
There are already plenty of well-thought-out options. To the point where if you expect some sort of miracle to occur, and huge sums suddenly to appear, you’re not quite sane. Or if you think any fix is easy, ditto.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Executive Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and (I think) the Congressional Research Service (CRS) all have created extensive lists of options for reducing the Federal deficit. Not to mention all the various private-sector entities that have been chiming in on this for years.
Even the most superficial study shows why those remain options, and have not been implemented.
A quick and obvious lesson from CBO’s budget options list.
The CBO web page on this issue (https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options) lists so many options that they give you a search function, with limits.
Let’s say you’re in a mood to think big, and you’re only interested in items with at least half-a-trillion-dollars in deficit reduction (over a ten-year budget window). No problem. Above, you see the first dozen such half-trillion-dollar items on the CBO list.
Bear in mind that the CBO-listed dollar amounts are for a ten-year budget window. So, with the deficit currently running around $2T a year, you’d be need for a total of $20T in savings, off this list, to claim to come close to balancing the budget.
Lesson 1: You’d have to do all of the above, and then some, to come close to balancing the budget.
Lesson 2: Notice how many lines say “waste, fraud, and abuse”. None of them. Instead, essentially every item consists of either raising taxes, or shifting costs to the states, businesses, or citizens.
And the rest …
You can find similar types of “savings” lists from GAO.
As if this writing, the OMB website appears to have been wiped and replace with pro-MAGA pap. It’s now a great source for pretty pictures of the President and First Lady. It no longer appears to offer any information whatsoever to the public.
Conclusion
None of this is news to anyone who has ever given this 10 minutes’ worth of research. Surely, the MAGAts who’ve taken over the Federal government know this. And therefore anyone can infer that, whatever they’re hoping to accomplish with “DOGE” chaos, addressing the budget deficit isn’t one of them.
It’s just icing on the cake that these folks now have unfettered access to every Federal tax return. What could possibly go wrong with that?
The Federal government used to have rules. For reasons.
Now, apparently, whatever you can grab, its yours. Just make up a plausible-sounding reason, and you’re good to go.
