DOGE can find the $2 trillion in spending cuts Musk wants, but the savings could take a while
When Elon Musk was asked on the campaign trail how much he believes the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could "rip out" from the Biden-Harris administration's $6.5 trillion budget, he said, "I think we could do at least $2 trillion."
Musk, who is already pursuing DOGE targets with co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy for the incoming Trump administration, is known for achieving ambitious goals. But even the most ardent proponents of rooting out government waste and downsizing the bureaucracy are skeptical that such an amount could be cut from the annual budget.
"It seemed like he was saying $2 trillion a year, which is, frankly, a ridiculous number," Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) told FOX Business in an interview. "Getting $2 trillion a year of deficit reduction – if you do really hard stuff – is extremely unlikely. And if you're only going after things you'd consider waste [or] inefficiency, it's just not there."
Goldwein pointed out that $2 trillion is more than the total the U.S. government spends on non-defense appropriations, and while it appears DOGE will look at efficiencies in defense, too, the number is nearly as much as the government spends on total appropriations.
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Outside of interest payments – which now exceed defense spending – the budget is $6 trillion, and most of the largest spending program is Social Security, followed by Medicare and Medicaid, along with other mandatory obligations that can't be touched.
While slashing $2 trillion a year might be a tough feat, Goldwein says, cutting trillions over a decade would not be that difficult, and CRFB has pointed to several ways to achieve just that.
Last month, CRFB reported President-elect Trump could save the U.S. $1.4 trillion alone over the next ten years just by reversing President Biden's executive actions, and the non-partisan group also identified another $700 billion in deficit reduction options that are low-hanging fruit – meaning easy and relatively bipartisan.
Even if DOGE's goals might be overly ambitious, the CRFB is still cheering on the initiative.
When Musk took to X to point out "the massive waste in healthcare" in the U.S. on Wednesday, Goldwein replied, "If @DOGE identified and helps cut waste and inefficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid it will be a huge success!!" and pointed to a list of ideas that could achieve $2 trillion worth of savings over a decade.
Goldstein says there are all sorts of ways the government can make cuts, and CRFB is working aggressively to lay them all out. The non-profit will continue to release options for cutting that would amount to tens of trillions of dollars over a decade.
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"We're gonna look at everything," Goldstein told FOX Business. " But those options aren't all going to be in the category of waste, and a lot of them are going to be things that one party or both parties isn't going to like, and that's why we think: Get as big a universe as possible, and then hopefully they will pick some subset of them all."