RUTHFULLY YOURS

As you’ve probably figured out, the headline above is a trick, a rhetorical question. Because we know going in that our government has spent so much since the COVID-era began that there’s no question it can be cut sharply. And, in answer to the question above, $2 trillion is just a start.

But that’s just a base number set by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tagged by President-elect Donald Trump to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE” for short.

“As President Trump said, what we need is common sense,” Musk said. “This won’t be business as usual. This is going to be a revolution.”

And by that, he means a root-and-branch restructuring of the U.S. government and its sprawling, wasteful mega-bureaucracy, with co-leader Ramaswamy set to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Ambitious indeed.

We’re ecstatic to hear a presidential administration entering with genuine talk of sharply reducing the actual size of government. With $36 trillion in debt (and rising fast), we as a nation will soon be functionally bankrupt, unable to pay our bills or raise more money in debt markets to continue our spending.

The fiscal situation is grave, affecting everything from defense to Social Security and Medicare and everything in between.

As such, the plan by the DOGE-duo of Musk and Ramaswamy can actually be seen not as a radical attack on government, but rather as an effort to restore some balance after four years of the Democrats’ insane spending and debt accumulation to pay for its COVID schemes.

First, a quick look at the damage done: Total spending for fiscal 2024, which ended in September, was $6.752 trillion, a 52% gain from 2019’s pre-COVID $4.447 trillion. Do the math: It’s a 52% gain, for an average of just over 10% a year.

Meanwhile, thanks to our trillion-dollar annual deficits, federal debt has exploded from “just” $22.7 trillion in 2019 to $36 trillion currently, a 59% rise in just five years.

See also: “One Month In, And The Gov’t Is Already $257 Billion In The Red – DOGE Has A Lot Of Work To Do“

None of this is sustainable. Period. And Democrats’ refusal to cut anything or to recognize the dysfunction and waste in our sprawling bureaucracy and its millions of employees has become dangerous, an internal threat to America’s stability and its future viability.

Trump will have just four years to wrestle with all this in his final term in office. Depending on what happens politically between now and 2028, this may be our nation’s last chance to kill the Leviathan before it kills us.

But how can it be done?

As hinted above, it starts with cutting things. A lot.

“We expect mass reductions,” Ramaswamy recently told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts of all federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government. So, yes, we expect all of the above.”

This won’t be done willy-nilly. Nor will there be exceptions, including defense, which recently admitted it “can’t account for what its $842B budget is spent on.”

As John F. DiLeo recently described in American Thinker:

They intend an 18-month project, hopefully to conclude by our nation’s 250th anniversary, in which they will apply standard American manufacturing cost-cutting techniques such as LEAN and Six Sigma tools, to find out how much fat is in every federal department, bureau and agency, and cut it out as fast as possible.

Such fat might be identified in surplus personnel, surplus office costs, unnecessary perks, redundant systems, and more.  It is assumed they can cut 10% of the federal workforce without it even being noticed; with such diligent chiefs as these at the helm, there’s no telling how much more money they will be able to save the taxpayer.

But, of course, even all that won’t balance the budget. Critics rightly note that entitlements — mainly Social Security and Medicare and other health programs — now make up roughly two-thirds of all spending. Both are popular.

Discretionary spending is only about a quarter of the total, while debt service is now roughly 18% — for a total of just over $2 trillion.

So is $2 trillion even possible?

Yes, but it won’t be easy.

In addition to closing departments and agencies, whose budgets were permanently swollen during the COVID lockdown, Musk and Ramaswamy will have to get creative.

Start with Social Security and Medicare, which need reform, if only to keep them from financial disaster. Also, kill the costly, unnecessary, and growth-killing “Net-Zero” program, which, according to one estimate, will total more than $4.5 trillion a year in total costs, public and private.

James Pinkerton, who served in the Reagan administration and for years has critiqued America’s budget mistakes, notes that the U.S. has hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of rare earths, oil, gas, and other useful things underground.

Pinkerton asks: Why not take entitlement spending entirely out of the federal budget, and pay for it with royalties from energy on federal properties, just as Texas now pays for its first-rate University of Texas system with state oil royalties?

That’s just one idea. There are plenty of others out there, and no doubt Musk and Ramaswamy are sifting through them all. The point is, creativity is badly needed.

As the 2024 election shows, Americans are tired of the status quo. The vast expansion of the wasteful spending of the bureaucratic and administrative state, the power of government to censor constitutionally free speech, along with Dems’ lawfare against their ideological enemies, have soured people on the progressive vision of an ever-expanding federal government.

Our republic was built for strong, independent citizens with rule of law, free markets, and limited government. The Democrats in recent years have flipped all that on its head, adding divisive “woke” politics to the mix. By taking a whack at our out-of-control administrative state and bureaucracy, Musk and Ramaswamy will be taking a badly needed first step toward restoring that original vision.