The $7 billion cut by the Department of Government Efficiency thus far is only about 1/1,000th of the 2024 federal budget. DOGE hasn’t taken a chainsaw to federal spending — just a pocket knife.
Both President Donald Trump and Elon Musk tout the work of DOGE as a promise they’ve kept to fiscal conservatives. But DOGE is not the answer they say it is.
In fact, DOGE is not and will never be the real solution to the budget deficit problem.
The real answer lies in meaningful structural changes to spending, but neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to address this.
Trump told his voters on the campaign trail he would address America’s financial problems and cut the nearly $2 billion budget deficit the Biden administration accumulated each year. Trump’s only effort to keep his word thus far has been through DOGE, which he created to audit the federal government for “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
According to its website, DOGE has already saved taxpayers more than $55 billion, but these numbers are massively inflated.
A financial analysis published by the Wall Street Journal Feb. 22 revealed the contracts cut by DOGE have yielded closer to $7 billion thus far. The Journal predicts that number will shrink to $2.6 billion over the next year.
This overestimation is due to the fact that DOGE cuts federal contracts, but most of the money “saved” from these cuts will still be spent by the federal agencies on other things.
The federal agencies DOGE has audited have not undergone meaningful budget changes, and it does not appear they will anytime soon. This means these agencies will create new contracts to spend the money in their budget, making the DOGE cuts much less meaningful in the absence of significant structural change.
DOGE is a Band-Aid on a system running rampant with irresponsible spending. No matter how much waste, fraud, and abuse it finds, the savings will tally up to a mere drop in the ocean of federal spending.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security and Medicare-related spending adds up to more than $3 trillion per year, yet Trump refuses to touch them.
These programs are almost entirely paid for by designated tax revenue from the payroll tax, meaning they require little extra funding from Congress.
In 2023, $1.6 trillion of the tax revenue controlled by Congress went to social welfare programs, according to House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington. Welfare programs used more discretionary funding than Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending combined.
Means-tested social welfare programs, including food stamps, federal housing, and almost 100 other welfare programs, consumed 72.6% of unobligated federal tax revenue last year, according to Arrington.
These payments meant the average welfare recipient household made about $80,000 in 2022, and the median U.S. household income that year was about $75,000 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
If the Trump administration really wants to address the spending problem, a meaningful place to start would be addressing the means-tested welfare programs that are running wildly out of control.
Even though Congress passes the budget, the executive branch runs the welfare programs. A gradual 50% cut to welfare benefits could eventually save the federal government $800 billion per year, and the average welfare recipient household would still see its income rise to almost $50,000 per year, leaving it well above the poverty line.
Most politicians see cutting welfare benefits as political suicide, and they might be right. People do not tend to vote for candidates who promise to give them less free money.
However, this administration is in a unique position to handle that problem. Trump is a second term president who does not need to seek reelection, putting him in an excellent position to make the hard choice and cut structural spending.
For the last century, each generation of Americans has massively added to the national debt, passing it on to their children with the knowledge that someone will have to deal with it eventually. The first step to dealing with it is to stop the ever-increasing budget deficit.
DOGE is not capable of meaningful spending cuts that will dig America out of the massive deficits incurred each year by the federal government. Instead, Trump should focus on fixing the rampant spending problems in the Social Security, Medicare, and social welfare programs.
The Trump administration has yet to show it is serious about addressing America’s real financial problems. Fiscal conservatives should not be content with surface-level solutions.
Luke Miller is a sophomore studying political economy.
