There is no way to meet the goal of reducing deficits by $1 trillion without significant cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

I n 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. Defense spending amounts to about $900 billion while veterans’ programs and military retirement benefits exceed $300 billion. Put that out of the way and you’re down to about $1.6 trillion of the budget to cut.

Yet even there, it’s hard to see where the savings come from. He’s already said he wouldn’t want to repeal Obamacare anymore, and if he isn’t touching Medicaid, it’s hard to believe he’d have the stomach to slash the related Children’s Health Insurance Program. Unless you think Trump is going to push for eliminating nearly all other aid programs (such as food stamps, child tax credits, unemployment benefits, etc.), which Republicans have never shown the stomach for seriously cutting for as long as I’ve been alive, they will get nowhere near $1 trillion.

Another response is that while the Musk/Trump tandem isn’t going to touch benefits or gut our military readiness, there is plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse within the defense budget and entitlement programs that will be eliminated.

Now, I am second to few in my cynicism of how the federal government operates. I have no doubt there is corruption and waste within the Pentagon. There are all sorts of criminal schemes involving Medicare and Medicaid (such as ones involving the billing of unnecessary medical equipment). But even if waste, fraud, and abuse were completely eliminated, it would not generate $1 trillion in savings.

The bottom line is that entitlements are expensive not primarily due to fraud — even though fraud exists — but because the Social Security program sends monthly checks to over 70 million people while every day, doctors’ offices, hospitals, pharmacies, and nursing homes are filled with a large number of the 68 million Medicare beneficiaries and 80 million beneficiaries of Medicaid/CHIP.

To be sure, any effort to root out waste from the federal budget should be welcome. And those of us who have been writing about the federal budget for a long time shouldn’t be so snooty as to argue that because smaller cuts won’t solve the problem on their own, Musk shouldn’t bother.

But at the same time, we should acknowledge that the focus on waste is ultimately a dodge. That’s because it’s much easier to promise that the government can save lots of money while cutting taxes and not reducing anybody’s benefits than it is to make the philosophical case that it shouldn’t be the role of government to ensure that everybody has a comfortable retirement with generous health care benefits.