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 …
The current push to fire Federal workers is all about purging the bureaucracy. This is standard operating procedure for autocrats. You won’t see a modern autocratic takeover of a former democracy without it.
In case you were confused, this explains why (e.g.) Musk et al. keeps going out of their way to insult Federal workers gratuitously, why the firings are so slap-dash, and why the dollar total of claimed savings seems to be treated as a joke, not worth checking for accuracy.
All of that, because if your primary goal is simply to purge the bureaucracy so that you can replace it with your loyal partisan hacks, none of that matters. Heck, insulting Federal workers is a feature, not a bug.
It’s not about making any material savings in tax dollars, because everyone who has even the faintest idea where the money goes realizes that the dollars you can save by reducing the federal workforce itself are small. Most of what the Federal government does is make transfer payments. Take taxes from some, give that money to others.
Source: SSA.
For example, Social Security is 20% of the Federal budget. The entire overhead of Social Security — Federal workers, contractors, their offices and equipment — accounts for about 0.5% of Social Security costs. The other 99.5% is payments to the aged, blind, and disabled. Administrative costs of Social Security have been below 1% of total costs since 1989, so this isn’t exactly some new development.
Sure, Republicans get their jollies cutting the EPA. And, apparently, they’ve now jumped the shark on “starve the beast”, and simply plan to reduce IRS employment until the government is no longer able to collect taxes, and so goes from starvation to bankruptcy.
Source: Citations given below.
But the bottom line is that compensation of civilian employees (i.e., not the uniformed services) amounted to $271B in 2023 (reference: Congressional Budget Office). Or, about 4% of total Federal outlays of around $6.75T (reference: US Treasury).
By reference, the current annual budget deficit runs around $2T per year. You can fire them all, and it’ll hardly make a dent in the deficit.
Worse, there are some areas where the Federal government really does hire people to do the work, not just to move the money. But the three agencies with the largest civilian Federal workforce are Defense, Veteran’s Affairs, and Homeland Security.
If you are wondering why the Veteran’s Administration is on that list, it’s largely because the VA runs more than 1000 health care facilities, including (as I recall) about 160 hospitals. That, along with many outpatient clinics, skilled nursing facilities. And about 150 national cemeteries, as veterans retain a burial benefit, and can claim the right to have their remains buried in a VA cemetery.
Don’t confuse “purging the bureaucracy as part of a power grab” with a genuine effort to balance the budget.
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.
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 lists of potential savings 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.
