Finding Trillions in Federal Cuts Is Easy. But Will Trump and Musk Follow Through?
During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, the national debt increased by $8 trillion—due, in large part, to huge spending hikes that Congress passed and Trump signed.
Can SpaceX CEO Elon Musk help Trump avoid a repeat performance? While campaigning alongside Trump in the final days of the presidential race, Musk pledged not merely to limit future spending increases but to cut the cost of government in a big way. When asked at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in October how much waste “we can rip out” of the $6.75 trillion annual federal budget, Musk estimated “at least $2 trillion.”
That sentiment reflects the relentless pursuit of efficiency that has become a hallmark of Musk’s companies, including Tesla and X, where Musk purged more than 6,000 jobs after buying the social media site (then known as Twitter) in 2022. It might also demonstrate his naiveté about government, where the incentives are stacked heavily against cost cutting.
Musk and fellow tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to co-chair Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a non-Cabinet entity that will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings,” the pair wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in November. Armed with a couple of recent Supreme Court rulings that have weakened the power of the administrative state, Musk and Ramaswamy certainly have the right objectives in mind. “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons,” they promised. “We’ll cut costs.”
Good. Still, the biggest challenge facing the DOGE project will not be finding wasteful government spending to cut. There is so much of that, and there are whole agencies—the Government Accountability Office (GAO), most prominently—already tasked with calling lawmakers’ and executive branch officials’ attention to it.
No, the hardest part will be following through with the cuts themselves, and doing so when whole bureaucracies and media narratives are objecting to the effort.
The most obvious question about Musk’s promise to rip $2 trillion out of the federal budget is also one of the easiest to answer: Can it be done?
Yes, absolutely. In 2019, the last full budget year before the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed even
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