If President-elect Donald Trump wants to put trillions of dollars in federal spending on the chopping block, he’ll find plenty to cut, ranging from billions doled out to states and wealthy corporations, to funding studies teaching monkeys how to gamble.
Mr. Trump advanced his campaign promise to slash government spending and regulation by creating a new commission aimed at cutting waste. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which would operate outside the government, will be led by billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The commission will partner with the White House’s budget office to slash regulations, cut staff and overhaul federal operations.
Mr. Trump has offered scant details about what he wants to cut from the government’s $6.75 trillion annual budget. Mr. Musk, who vowed to slash $2 trillion in government spending, has suggested eliminating the Education Department, which has an annual budget of about $79 billion, and NPR’s funding.
Both are relatively small recipients of federal money, and experts say the commission should be thinking bigger.
Program cuts/privatization
“In theory, this is easy. There is more than $2 trillion to cut in the federal government even in a single year,” said Veronique de Rugy, who teaches political economy at George Mason University. “In 2019, we spent $2.4 trillion less than we’re spending now and people weren’t miserable and dying in the streets.”
Ms. de Rugy said the most straightforward approach is across-the-board cuts to all departments. For example, eliminating roughly 6% from the Pentagon’s $800 billion budget would result in $50 billion in savings, which would add up across departments.
Chris Edwards, who studies fiscal policy for the libertarian CATO Institute, said cutting aid-to-state programs would save $1.1 trillion annually.
Federal subsidies going to state-run programs include:
*Medicaid, which Mr. Edwards estimates could save the government $300 billion by imposing a hard cap on state aid.
*$165 billion in broadband subsidies, of which $100 billion was funded through President Biden’s infrastructure law.
*$100 billion in green energy tax breaks and subsidies, which were included in Mr. Biden’s trillion-dollar tax, healthcare and climate law.
*$55 billion in public housing grants.
*$30 billion doled out to the nation’s K-12 public schools.
*$30 billion spent on farm subsidies.
*$21 billion in community development grants to fund arts facilities and street projects.
*$20 billion on urban transit for city bus and railroad systems.
Mr. Edwards also favors banning food stamp recipients from purchasing junk food such as soda, candy, potato chips, cookies and ice cream, which account for roughly 25% of the $105 billion in federal food stamp subsidies.
He also called for slashing the $47 billion spent on foreign aid.
“These cuts will improve the American government and democracy,” Mr. Edwards said. “Getting the federal government out of K-12 schools will be a big win for democracy and reduce the deficit, which is a bonus.”
Also on the table in addition to cuts would be privatizations of various government departments, including the U.S. Post Office, Amtrak, Air Traffic Controllers and the Import-Export Bank.
While the Post Office is entirely funded by the revenue it generates from sales, it has lost more than $90 billion since 2007. In 2022, the Senate approved a taxpayer-funded $50 billion bailout to improve its financial footing.
“Among the first cuts should be all the stuff the government is doing that should be the purview of the private sector,” Ms. de Rugy said. “There is all this stuff that is shouldered by the federal government that should be returned to the private sector. If you eliminate the Import-Export bank, you are eliminating a lot of bureaucracy.”
Termination
During his failed run for the presidency, Mr. Ramaswamy talked about cutting the federal workforce by 75%, and Mr. Mush shrunk Twitter’s workforce by 80%.
Mr. Trump has vowed to fire “rogue bureaucrats” to purge thousands of government workers through the use of Schedule F. A product of an executive order Mr. Trump signed near the end of his first term, it would give him the ability to reclassify civil servants as appointees, thus stripping them of legal protections.
It is unclear how many employees would be reclassified, but the National Treasury Employees Union said it discovered that under Mr. Trump, the White House Office of Management and Budget approved reclassifying 68% of its employees.
Mr. Trump’s allies have called on him to target workers at the Justice Department, which they have accused of weaponizing law enforcement against conservatives, as well as workers at the Department of Education.
But substantial cuts to the federal workforce won’t create the types of savings Mr. Trump wants to realize. The federal workforce cost taxpayers $384 billion in 2024, and a 20% reduction would result in a savings of $76 billion, a mere drop in the bucket of annual budget deficits that regularly top $1 trillion.
Waste
Targeting government waste will likely be atop the DOGE’s to-do list, but finding wasteful spending isn’t as easy as at it sounds. Waste occurs across nearly every government agency and program, and can sometimes be a small number that’s difficult to spot.
For example, the government spent roughly $300 billion last year on overpayments through four key programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment benefits.
“It’s not easy to eliminate these overpayments. If it was easy, it would have been done by now,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “There is no line item in the budget that says waste fraud and abuse.”
According to a report released last year by Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, the Department of Defense spent $8,295 on a lobster tank for the Pentagon, which it purchased from a Virginia restaurant equipment company.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent roughly $500,000 to change the gender of male rhesus monkeys to see if males pumped with female hormones were more susceptible to HIV. However, the monkeys were immune to HIV, making the entire project a waste.
The National Institutes of Health spent $3.7 million to teach monkeys how to gamble so it could study how the brain makes risky decisions.
Resistance
It’s not clear whether the DOGE’s recommendations will be welcomed on the Hill, and most cuts would have to be approved by Congress, which along with the White House controls federal spending.
The Republicans will control the House and Senate through July 2026, when the DOGE’s findings are due, giving Mr. Trump the opportunity to enact at least some of the commission’s proposals.
Experts say resistance from Congress could be fierce, even within Mr Trump’s own party.
“They are going to hit substantial roadblocks because of Republican opposition as much as Democratic opposition. I just don’t see the appetite for a massive war on spending,” Mr. Riedl said. “Even the Republican lawmakers have gotten used to playing Santa Claus and they aren’t used to saying no to their constituents.”
The majority of Republicans who ran for election this year adopted a platform of border security, lowering costs, supporting Mr. Trump and reducing crime. None adopted the Tea Party mantra of reducing government spending that some Republicans embraced roughly a decade ago.
Last year, a Republican-controlled House sparred internally over how to eliminate $130 billion in discretionary spending to avoid a government shutdown. Ultimately, lawmakers have passed stop-gap bills to keep from implementing dramatic cuts.
Previous efforts to reduce government spending have yielded few results. In 1982, President Reagan tapped J. Peter Grace, the CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., to rein in spending. He recommended 2,500 reforms, most of which were never implemented, including several that would have required legislation from Congress.
In the 1990s, President Clinton created the National Performance Review to create a less costly government. The panel streamlined some operations and cut 300,000 government jobs, but its efforts were only a small sliver of overall government spending.
In 2010, President Obama created a commission headed by Republican Senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles to propose ideas to lower spending and reduce the deficit. The 18-member commission’s recommendations went nowhere.
Its proposals couldn’t even gain support among the commission’s members. It needed 14 members to approve it, but only received 11 votes.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.