Philip Klein writes for National Review Online about a mathematical fact confronting the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team.
In their joint interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel, Elon Musk said that the goal of DOGE was to identify ways to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion while President Trump vowed that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security “won’t be touched.”
To give credit where it’s due, Musk built a massive fortune by proving naysayers wrong. But reaching his savings goal while honoring Trump’s political commitments isn’t like blasting a rocket into space and having it land back in the same place. It’s more like launching into space a rocket that’s fueled by maple syrup. That is, there is no plausible way to get the math to work.
In this fiscal year, the government is expected to spend over $7 trillion while raising closer to $5 trillion, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office estimates. There are two basic ways of reducing the resulting $1.9 trillion deficit — raising more revenue or slashing spending.
We can take revenue out of the equation. Trump has proposed fully renewing the 2017 tax cuts while introducing several new ones. If his ideas get through, it will almost certainly reduce revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. But to be charitable in this exercise, let’s just say revenue remains roughly the same. That means all of the savings have to be achieved through spending cuts.
Of that $7 trillion, $952 billion represents interest payments on the debt, which could not be immediately reduced, because even balancing the budget tomorrow would not make a dent in the $30 trillion in debt we already owe. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent another $3.3 trillion. That means, in addition to revenue being off the table, a majority of the spending is untouchable.
There are multiple possible responses to this from those who still have faith in Musk. One is that even if you don’t touch any of these programs, that still leaves about $2.8 trillion from which to cut. But look at those other categories; there’s no reason to believe that Trump will be eager to seriously slash spending in any of them.
