DOGE’s first targets to cut

OPINION:

President Biden is spending as fast as he can before he leaves office. The government’s debt is already over $36 trillion. The annual interest on that debt is more than the entire Pentagon budget of nearly $900 billion.

The government will spend $1.6 trillion in fiscal 2025 on what we neither want nor need.

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency won’t, thank heaven, be another government agency but a commission headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy aimed at cutting government spending. If it acts in time for the fiscal 2025 budget reconciliation bill, DOGE may be able to significantly reduce the size and expense of the federal government.

Too many government departments do nothing more than perpetuate themselves and impose burdensome regulations. The Department of Education teaches no one anything, the Department of Energy doesn’t produce a single kilowatt-hour of electricity and the Department of Labor does no useful work. None of them, however, will be eliminated by DOGE because, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the closest thing to immortality is a government bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, we can suggest a few targets that DOGE can begin with and, we hope, carry through on budget reconciliation to slash federal spending.

The fattest target is the United Nations. We are propping up the U.N. to the tune of about $18 billion this year. The amount we can be “assessed” by the U.N. is limited to 22% of its budget, and we also provide 27% of its peacekeeping budget. That is by far more than any other member nation contributes. Those amounts don’t include the other funds paid to U.N. organizations such as UNESCO and the U.N.’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which Mr. Trump took us out of in his first term.

Mr. Trump should take us out of UNESCO again, as well as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which hires terrorists. Given the other members’ lack of financial support of the U.N. — Russia contributes about 3% of the U.N. budget — DOGE and Mr. Trump should cut our contributions by more than half.

Why bother with the U.N.? For one reason only: Our Security Council veto is worth it to protect ourselves and our allies from its depredations.

Other targets for DOGE are ripe for major cuts.

Congress allocated about $516 billion — thanks mainly to Sen. Bernie Sanders — to “zombie” programs. A zombie program is one for which the authorizing legislation has expired. The 2025 budget reconciliation bill should prohibit the funding of expired programs.

Any budget reconciliation should also cancel all diversity, equity and inclusion and other “wokeness” expenditures by the government. The Department of Health and Human Services alone, according to a Nov. 12 report in this newspaper, spends hundreds of millions on DEI.

There are too many other examples of government waste to catalog here. According to one report, among them are $6 million to boost tourism in Egypt, $200 million to famous entertainers from the Small Business Administration and a National Institutes of Health grant to study the effects of treadmill use on Russian cats.

All of those programs and grants should be canceled, and federal bureaucrats’ authority to spend money on their favorite nonsense should be canceled. DOGE should update and adopt former Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Back in Black” deficit reduction plan, which would have reduced our debts by about $9 trillion in 10 years.

DOGE will have to hurry to list all the programs it wants canceled because, according to the Budget Control Act of 1974, a reconciliation bill can happen only once a year.

DOGE will be tempted to focus first on the Pentagon budget, but — as much as that budget is tempting — its focus should be first on other agencies such as the State Department, HHS, the Department of Homeland Security and the rest. Every one of those agencies’ budgets contains an enormous amount of waste that should be cut.

As this column has written, one of the problems the Pentagon suffers from is the Air Force’s “pass-through” spending, which deprives the Air Force of as much as $40 billion and is passed on to other agencies, probably defense intelligence agencies. A budget reconciliation bill must end the pass-through process, but the Air Force’s budget could be thoroughly wrecked by doing what Mr. Musk wants to do on manned aircraft.

Mr. Musk said that “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” Converting our Air Force and Navy to using only unmanned aircraft would cancel essential programs such as Next Generation Air Dominance, which aims to create a sixth-generation manned air superiority fighter. Chinese pilots are already flying two different prototypes of sixth-generation fighters. Mr. Musk’s casual remark was fundamentally wrong.

The budget reconciliation process is long, but DOGE has little time to prepare its recommendations. The president will submit his budget for fiscal 2026 in the spring or early summer, and the reconciliation process will follow.

Speed and focus are essential to DOGE’s success. Although it may have another shot at budget cuts next year, the time to act is now.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.