President-elect Donald Trump will find plenty to cut from federal spending, including billions of dollars doled out to states and wealthy corporations and research funding to teach monkeys how to gamble.
Mr. Trump advanced his campaign promise to slash government spending and regulation by creating a commission to cut waste. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will operate outside the government, will be led by billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The commission will partner with the White House budget office to slash regulations, cut staff and overhaul federal operations.
Mr. Trump has offered scant details about what he wants to cut from the government’s $6.75 trillion annual budget. Mr. Musk, who vowed to slash $2 trillion in government spending, has suggested eliminating the Education Department, which has an annual budget of about $79 billion, and NPR’s funding.
Both are relatively small recipients of federal money, and experts say the commission should be thinking bigger.
Program cuts, privatization
“In theory, this is easy. There is more than $2 trillion to cut in the federal government even in a single year,” said Veronique de Rugy, who teaches political economy at George Mason University. “In 2019, we spent $2.4 trillion less than we’re spending now and people weren’t miserable and dying in the streets.”
Ms. de Rugy said the most straightforward approach is to make across-the-board cuts to all departments. Eliminating roughly 6% of the Pentagon’s $800 billion budget would result in $50 billion in savings, which would add up across departments.
Chris Edwards, who studies fiscal policy for the libertarian Cato Institute, said cutting aid to state programs would save $1.1 trillion annually.
Federal subsidies for state-run programs include:
• Medicaid. Mr. Edwards estimates a hard cap on state aid could save the government $300 billion.
• $165 billion in broadband subsidies, $100 billion of which was funded through President Biden’s infrastructure law.
• $100 billion in green energy tax breaks and subsidies, which were included in Mr. Biden’s trillion-dollar tax, health care and climate law.
• $55 billion in public housing grants.
• $30 billion for the nation’s K-12 public schools.
• $30 billion in farm subsidies.
• $21 billion in community development grants to fund arts facilities and street projects.
• $20 billion in urban transit funding for city bus and railroad systems.
Mr. Edwards also favors banning food stamp recipients from buying junk food such as soda, candy, potato chips, cookies and ice cream, which account for roughly 25% of the $105 billion in federal food stamp subsidies.
He called for slashing the $47 billion spent on foreign aid.
“These cuts will improve the American government and democracy,” Mr. Edwards said. “Getting the federal government out of K-12 schools will be a big win for democracy and reduce the deficit, which is a bonus.”
Privatizations of various government departments, including the U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, air traffic controllers and the Import-Export Bank, would also be considered.
Although the Postal Service is entirely funded by the revenue it generates from sales, it has lost more than $90 billion since 2007. In 2022, the Senate approved a taxpayer-funded $50 billion bailout to improve the service’s financial footing.
“Among the first cuts should be all the stuff the government is doing that should be the purview of the private sector,” Ms. de Rugy said. “There is all this stuff that is shouldered by the federal government that should be returned to the private sector. If you eliminate the Import-Export bank, you are eliminating a lot of bureaucracy.”
Termination
During his presidential run, Mr. Ramaswamy discussed cutting the federal workforce by 75%. Mr. Musk shrank Twitter’s workforce by 80%.
Mr. Trump has vowed to purge thousands of government workers, including “rogue bureaucrats,” through the use of Schedule F. A product of an executive order Mr. Trump signed near the end of his first term, Schedule F would give him the ability to reclassify civil servants as appointees, thus stripping them of legal protections.
It is not clear how many employees would be reclassified, but the National Treasury Employees Union said it discovered that the White House Office of Management and Budget approved reclassifications of 68% of its employees under Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s allies have called on him to target workers at the Justice Department, which they accuse of weaponizing law enforcement against conservatives, and at the Department of Education.
Substantial cuts to the federal workforce won’t create the types of savings Mr. Trump wants. The federal workforce will cost taxpayers $384 billion in 2024, and a 20% reduction would result in savings of $76 billion, a drop in the bucket of annual budget deficits that regularly top $1 trillion.
Waste
Targeting government waste will likely be a top priority for the DOGE, but finding wasteful spending isn’t as easy as it sounds. Nearly every government agency and program has waste, sometimes a small amount that can be difficult to spot.
The government spent roughly $300 billion last year on overpayments through four key programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment benefits.
“It’s not easy to eliminate these overpayments. If it was easy, it would have been done by now,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “There is no line item in the budget that says waste, fraud and abuse.”
According to a report released last year by Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, the Department of Defense purchased an $8,295 lobster tank for the Pentagon from a Virginia restaurant equipment company.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent roughly $500,000 to change the gender of male rhesus monkeys to determine whether males pumped with female hormones were more susceptible to HIV. The monkeys were immune to HIV, making the project a waste.
The National Institutes of Health spent $3.7 million to teach monkeys how to gamble to study how the brain makes risky decisions.
Resistance
It’s not clear whether the DOGE’s recommendations will be welcomed on Capitol Hill. Most cuts must be approved by Congress, which, along with the White House, controls federal spending.
Republicans will control the House and Senate in July 2026, when the DOGE’s findings are due. This is expected to allow Mr. Trump to enact some of the commission’s proposals.
Experts say resistance from Congress could be fierce, even within Mr. Trump’s party.
“They are going to hit substantial roadblocks because of Republican opposition as much as Democratic opposition. I just don’t see the appetite for a massive war on spending,” Mr. Riedl said. “Even the Republican lawmakers have gotten used to playing Santa Claus, and they aren’t used to saying no to their constituents.”
Most Republicans who ran for election this year adopted a platform of border security, lowering costs, supporting Mr. Trump and reducing crime. None adopted the tea party mantra of reducing government spending that some Republicans embraced roughly a decade ago.
Last year, the Republican-controlled House sparred internally over how to eliminate $130 billion in discretionary spending to avoid a government shutdown. Lawmakers ultimately passed stopgap bills to prevent dramatic cuts from being implemented.
Previous efforts to reduce government spending have yielded few results. In 1982, President Reagan tapped J. Peter Grace, the CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., to rein in spending. He recommended 2,500 reforms, most of which were never implemented, including several that would have required legislation from Congress.
In the 1990s, President Clinton created the National Performance Review to create a less costly government. The panel streamlined some operations and cut 300,000 government jobs, but its efforts were only a sliver of overall government spending.
In 2010, President Obama created an 18-member commission headed by Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles to propose ideas to lower spending and reduce the deficit. The commission’s recommendations went nowhere.
Its proposals couldn’t even gain support among the commission’s members. They needed the votes of 14 members for approval but received only 11.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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