I’m sure DOGE will have a long history as the textbook definition of overpromising and underdelivering. There were a lot of reasons to be skeptical of their chances to meet their goals. But I just want to focus on simple realities DOGE didn’t – and couldn’t – alter.
In 2024, federal spending was $6.8 trillion. Of that $6.8 trillion, $4.1 trillion was so-called mandatory spending – spending on programs that is baked into existing law. Over $3 trillion of that $4.1 trillion went to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Now, there is no doubt fraud and abuse in each of these programs. But even if DOGE could have perfectly cut out 100% of that fraud, it wouldn’t have added up to much in the face of that $3 trillion. And the people of DOGE simply lacked the institutional knowledge needed to accurately identify a lot of what was or wasn’t fraud or waste. In any system, there will always be things that to an outsider look as though they are striking and dramatic anomalies, but actually have a perfectly mundane explanation. Much of Elon Musk’s early, dramatic statements like making claims about there being more active Social Security accounts than the total American population were just examples of him confusing himself by not understanding the basics. So their flurry of activity into mandatory spending was never a promising avenue.
Interest on the debt, while not technically mandatory in the sense defined above, isn’t exactly optional either, unless policymakers are thinking the United States needs another reduction in its credit rating. That interest accounted for another $900 billion in the 2024 budget.
That leaves a total of $1.8 trillion in so-called discretionary spending. The full military budget for operations, maintenance, servicemember pay, and all the rest, accounts for a little less than half of the discretionary budget. As for the remaining half of discretionary spending – you can just look at the infographic linked above and see how that half is divvied up. While discretionary spending might seem like the easiest to go after, the simple fact is that even huge cuts to this area aren’t going to do much to dent the deficit. For example, every now and then you see a news story about how millions dollars of taxpayer money was used on some comically absurd sounding study, like whether or not the mating behavior of clownfish is altered if they are shown video footage of circus clowns or whatever. (To be clear, that is an entirely imaginary study I invented for comic effect, and not something that was ever done, let alone funded with taxpayer money. (I hope.)) And this news story will become everyone’s favorite example about wasteful government spending for a while. But science, space, and technology as a combined category makes up only $41 billion in total – only about 2% of discretionary spending, and about 0.6% of the federal budget. Get rid of the funding for that clownfish study and a thousand more like it, and you still haven’t made a dent in the deficit. It’s a good move if you want to create flashy headlines and maximize your media coverage. But if you’re serious about fixing the deficit, going after the clownfish studies doesn’t even make the top 100 list of priorities.
To make a serious dent in the federal deficit will require serious reductions in mandatory spending, which makes up the bulk of federal spending. Anyone who says they want to reduce federal spending but won’t talk about making serious changes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and military spending is at a nonstarter from the beginning. These are all very popular programs. Silly studies about clownfish make much easier targets. Any politician who wants to seriously address federal spending should focus on the former. But a politician whose top priority is getting reelected will spend most of their time talking about the latter.
