CNN
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Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have pledged to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget as co-directors of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The two men say areas they want to target include the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And they want to scrutinize foreign aid, defense spending, and inaccurate payments the government sends to Social Security recipients and others.
But experts say extracting that much of federal spending will be a tall order. Much of the funding will support mandatory programs that must be funded under current law. These include Social Security and Medicare benefits and interest on federal debt.
Less than one-third of the federal budget for fiscal year 2024 is made up of discretionary spending that Congress authorizes each year. Nearly half of discretionary spending goes to defense programs, a sacred cow for many lawmakers.
“$2 trillion a year is a huge number, it’s impossible,” said Bobby Cogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
Taxpayer money goes to:
Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have also repeatedly said they can reduce the size of the federal workforce by forcing them to return to the office, in the hope that doing so will encourage more employees to quit. .
Fewer than half of federal employees are eligible to work from home, and some still spend the majority of their working hours in the office.
Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have attacked federal officials as bureaucrats overseeing an ever-growing web of regulations.
“The power of the unelected federal bureaucracy has grown to become an unconstitutional ‘fourth branch’ of government!” Musk posted on X earlier this week. “We have become the most powerful branch of government, especially with the creation of our own internal court system. We must fix this!”
But even though the federal government oversees more programs and offers more benefits, the number of federal employees is about the same as it was 50 years ago.
Elaine Kamarck, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, said that under former President Bill Clinton, the workforce was reduced by more than 400,000 people as the government sought to “reinvent” government. He could also use the collapse of the Soviet Union to clean up the Pentagon. However, the Sept. 11 attacks put a halt to layoffs in 2001, and the government has since increased intelligence and homeland security personnel.
While many people may think that federal employees are concentrated in Washington, DC and the surrounding metropolitan area, this is not the case.
“Federal employees serve Americans everywhere,” said Max Stier, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for an effective federal government. speak
