When providing analysis to my friends of President Trump’s actions, there is one overriding question. I have criticized positions of Trump despite overwhelmingly supporting his positions and actions. The one clear place with which I currently disagree with and would love to see the Administration change positions is sending checks to taxpayers for cost reductions in the federal government. These reductions would be realized by reducing the federal workforce and reining in expenditures, many of them fraudulent.
President Trump has taken many actions for which I am delighted. Banning DEI is among the top. It has a perceived ideological stink, misdirection from our historical standards of equality and promoting merit above physical aspects and wastes time and money on nonsense. I also love banning biological men from women’s sports. God knows how many times I have written about that. My personal favorite move by the President is the banning of paper straws. If there is a common cause of the American people, it is to discard this Leftist boondoggle.
The ideas that are generated from DOGE are now penetrating all departments with the approval of the cabinet secretaries. But the opposition to this bewitches me. The only real argument for me against what is being done is it is disarming to all our candidates for elected office. If we actually get rid of waste, fraud and abuse, the candidates will no longer have that flagpole to run up at campaign events. They will have to campaign for something they actually intend to accomplish for their constituents.
We are only a few short weeks into this process and the stories pile up like trash in a landfill. The number of inappropriate actions taken by our government are vast, most of which are largely enacted by government workers when left to their own devices. It is staggering to hear the wailing coming from the very Democrats who don’t want employment positions cut while they were the ones who spent our money so recklessly that we now have a $2 trillion annual deficit.
Plus, you have heard all the scare tactics. Diseases will spread, cancer cures will not be found, cats and dogs will be eaten (not by Haitians immigrants), buildings will collapse, and planes will fall from the sky. If you were to believe what the press is telling us, not one dollar of the $6.75 trillion expenditures is being misused.
A special place in political hell is reserved for Republican elected officials who are being used as fodder by the negligent press by stating that they have a problem with budget cuts that hit their constituents. I expect Democrats to act like irresponsible financial whores unwilling to recognize we cannot plow forward with this horrible budget imbalance. I expect them to say, “if we just had corporations and people who paid their fair share, we would be fine.” Any Republican that complains that budget cuts and job dismissals are hitting their district is a person who should be primaried and then drummed out of the party.
This gets to the significant part. Our budget deficit is caused by too much spending. It can come down — and significantly — if we identify unnecessary employees and discontinue spending money on things we cannot afford. Many of the expenditures are for things that seem nice but, if we don’t have the funds, we cannot do that right now. Just like at home, the family trip to Disney World only makes sense if you have the money in the bank; not if you have to borrow the money and pay it off until next year’s vacation and beyond.
There is a DOGE dividend. That is to shrink the deficit. That will shrink the borrowing and thus shrink the money paid out by the government for interest expense. If there is less money being spent on useless things and barely working government employees, then we will all benefit. That means interest rates will go down and the government will need less money. We will still have a long way to go even after we discontinue the irresponsible expenses because DOGE has barely scratched the surface of unneeded employees and irresponsible expenditures.
Sending out checks based on the cuts would be nice if we did not have a $2 trillion budget deficit and a $37 trillion debt. Until we eliminate those in a serious manner there is no room for sending taxpayers money. Sorry, Mr. President.
