In a piece at The Next American Century Richard Vigilante makes the counterintuitive to me argument that the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can, indeed, cut $2 trillion from the federal budget:
DOGE should function not by cutting spending to save money, but by cutting spending to improve performance.
It’s not hard. Eliminate any agency that does not, on net, make more of the thing for which it is named.
That is followed by a list of departments that, per Mr. Vigilante, fail to make the grade: Energy, Education, Agriculture, HUD, Commerce, Homeland Security, HHS, etc. The small problem with Mr. Vigilante’s rubric is that each of these departments has its own empowering legislation which would need to be repealed and/or modified and constituency which would oppose eliminating their favored programs.
I hasten to point out that Ronald Reagan who actually won a landslide victory and ran on eliminating specific departments did not eliminate a single department.
For Ronnie!!!!
We should eliminate the Department of Education and transfer its job assignments to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yes, to HHS where RFK could make sure that medical students would learn the truth ie AIDS was caused by poppers, vaccines dont work and the germ theory of disease is wrong. He could also go on to stop all research at the university level like they have done at NIH.
Steve
I think it’s time to fully tax religious organizations!!
Reagan had to concern himself with re-election in his first term and slept through the second.
Trump appears to be a man who is energized by his struggles and looks to be on a mission. Cutting agencies would be an uphill battle for a normal politician but for one who no longer cares about appearances or popularity it can be done .
I too, am in favor of religious institutions shouldering their own share of financial responsibility to the commmons.
All of the various departments exist, because powerful interests want them. Congress legislates by logrolling, trading favors, outright bribery and physical threats, etc. One person’s waste is another’s life support. In such a system, cutting spending is impossible. Balancing the budget by raising taxes is impossible. DOGE is guaranteed to fail.
By the way, deficit spending is not just a problem for democracy, and it is endemic in democracies. Every absolute monarch in history also ran deficits. Deficits are a fundamental, unavoidable feature of all forms of government, because all governments must feed their parasite supporters. Supporters exist, because they expect to be fed.
All governments eventually fail, because the parasite load gets too big. The interest on the debt cannot be paid. All fall down, and a new dance begins. The only serious question is how close to default the US is. Default is guaranteed to happen.
@Bob:
What if this time is different?
All of the people and institutions you’ve mentioned are the people that Trump is bitterly aware spent the last six years trying to put him in prison or kill him.
They remind him of their importance or their ability and he reminds himself of what they all tried to do to him and his family. They could remind him of his own mortality and their competence if they REALLY want to piss him off.
“It’s not hard. Eliminate any agency that does not, on net, make more of the thing for which it is named. ”
What stupidity. The “thing” most agencies make is regulations and decisions on the management of federal funding.
Let’s leave aside the very clear and present issue that most of what these Departments do is required by federal law, and DOGE specifically and the Executive Branch generally have no authority to violate US law.
Let’s take the Department of Education. Just about every school district and every State gets federal money that the Department of Education manages. Like much of the federal government, the Education Department’s biggest thing is dolling out money with various strings attached to it. What happens to that money if you eliminate that department, even if that were allowed by law?
If one can’t answer that very fundamental question, and similar ones, then I’m not going to take dumb ideas about eliminating $2 trillion from the budget seriously.
I agree w/ Andy, and would add that the Department of Education was elevated to a cabinet level position in 1979, before that it functioned as an office within the Department of Interior. It was in the Interior because the Land-Grant law passed by Lincoln first necessitated handling of federal funding and regulation. Reagan could have eliminated the “Department” pretty easily, but it wouldn’t eliminate the underlying legal responsibilities of the federal government.
Also been thinking about this while reading/hearing people sayin g Gabbard would be fine as Director of DNI because the job doesn’t have any responsibilities. This is a position created in response to the 9/11 Commission, which promoted a lot of chair-shuffling that probably didn’t make the country safer.
As should be obvious I agree with Andy as well.
PD Shaw:
I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security for, among other reasons, exactly what you described which I thought was a foreseeable outcom.
I refuse to accept that the bankruptcy of the United States and collapse of the dollar is a legal inevitability.
If you guys are saying, this is the in the power of the congress, not presidential edicts, I say, this is how we get the ball rolling, this is how we light a fire under congress.
Now, feel free to pontificate, fiddle while the dollar burns and enjoy the ride.
No need to worry, in 50 or so years there will be a completely new group running the world, many of us here today will be gone.
“Also been thinking about this while reading/hearing people sayin g Gabbard would be fine as Director of DNI because the job doesn’t have any responsibilities.”
The DNI director has a lot of responsibilities, the biggest one is allocating funding and setting intelligence collection and analysis priorities. This latter one is crucial because resources are limited and the IC can’t collect and analyze everything. It involves decisions about what intelligence problems to prioritize and failing to prioritize appropriately can lead to a major intelligence failure.
The tipping point is underway…is turning back possible?