Time to get out of DOGE

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

President Donald Trump’s executive orders require massive cuts to the federal budget, downsizing the federal workforce and weakening or dismantling critical federal agencies. The task of turning orders into policies has been outsourced to an unaccountable Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. DOGE, with Musk and Trump loyalists embedded in federal agencies, will recommend cuts and identify federal workers to be retained or dismissed based on political litmus tests.

Selling massive budget cuts to the U.S. people involves deception about actual motives and consequences. The first deception is that DOGE, which could be pronounced dodgy, is a government agency. It isn’t and Musk doesn’t have legal authority to do what he’s doing. Additionally, civilian federal employees and the agencies they work for are not instruments of a sinister “deep state” controlled by Democrats. They are part of an “administrative state” that relies on their skills and expertise to meet the needs of a complex democratic government and society. Only about 4,000 of the 2¼ million employees who make up the civilian federal workforce are political appointees. Rewarding skills and minimizing corrupting political patronage are central features of a thriving democracy.

Bureaucracies are imperfect but they are crucial to an administrative state that requires professionalism, monitoring, accountability and technological upgrades. These requirements are not the concerns of President Trump, or Musk, or DOGE, whose goals include stripping federal workers of legal protections, promoting authoritarian rule, increasing presidential power, expanding corporate influence, and removing checks and balances. Trump, confusing the presidency with kingship, unilaterally removed at least 17 (of 74) inspectors general whose principal responsibilities are to prevent fraud, waste and abuse, and to ensure efficiency within critical agencies.

A second deception involves the Trump administration positioning DOGE and massive budget cuts as necessary responses to the nation’s unsustainable debt while pursuing policies that dramatically increase the debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its 10-year budget outlook in January. The national debt is expected to rise by $23.9 trillion over the next decade, and that doesn’t include trillions of dollars of additional debt that will result from the Trump administration’s promised tax cuts.

A third deception involves DOGE promises to deliver massive budget cuts — Musk uses figures of $500 billion, $1 trillion, or $2 trillion — with minimal pain. Negative consequences are either ignored or celebrated as a way to hurt non-MAGA “woke” constituencies. Common citizens, whatever their political affiliation, are about to be fleeced by the billionaire class proposing these cuts.

In order to make sense of what is being cut and why, we need to understand the difference between discretionary and mandatory portions of the federal budget. Each year, Congress approves the discretionary budget that determines what agencies, priorities and services receive funding and how much they get. The mandatory portion of the budget consists of programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that, by law, must be paid. The total U.S. federal budget in 2023 was $6.2 trillion. The mandatory portion of the budget (including interest paid on the nation’s debt) was $4.5 trillion. The discretionary portion of the federal budget was $1.7 trillion. Insufficient tax revenue meant that fully funding the $6.2 trillion budget required borrowing $1.7 trillion, an amount equal to the entire discretionary budget. This added $1.7 trillion to the nation’s debt.

Trump, Musk and DOGE are taking a slash-and-burn approach to cutting the federal government. Their cuts hit the discretionary budget hard, but it is impossible to get all the money they want from the discretionary budget alone. According to the Office of Management and Budget, in 2023 military spending plus veterans benefits totaled more than $1 trillion of the discretionary budget. Including costs of homeland security and federal law enforcement, these four items accounted for 62% of federal discretionary spending. Trump promises to increase military spending. You can’t cut $500 billion, $1 trillion, or $2 trillion from the remaining 38% of the discretionary budget that totals $646 billion. Eliminating the Departments of Transportation, Education, Housing & Urban Development, Energy, Agriculture, Foreign Aid, Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department would reduce the discretionary budget by less than 17%, all taken from the 38% of the discretionary budget that is nonmilitary-based.

This leads us to the final deception. The Trump administration is continuing a longstanding Republican Party tradition of paying for tax breaks for the rich by hurting the poor and increasing the nation’s debt. The primary policy goal of Trump’s administration, past and present, is to retain and/or expand tax breaks for the wealthy. The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (TCJA) passed in 2017 will expire if not extended by Congress in 2025. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, the tax law was “skewed in favor of the rich,” with the top 1% receiving an average tax cut of $60,000 in 2025 while households in the bottom 60% received less than $500. In the center’s description, the law “eroded the nation’s revenue base.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that extending all the provisions could add more than $5 trillion to the deficit through fiscal year 2035.

Although the administration is enabling the national debt to soar, it is determined to have massive federal budget cuts partially offset even more massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Meeting this goal requires serious cuts to two federally funded programs: Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Trump says Social Security and Medicare are off the table but Medicaid is not. It is on the table because it is a big pot of money. Federal Medicaid spending in 2023 totaled $871.7 billion, with the federal government paying 69% of Medicaid’s costs and states covering 31%. A wealthy state like Minnesota received 50% federal subsidies and a poor state like Mississippi received 77%. Medicaid is also on the table for cuts because it serves vulnerable constituencies that have limited political clout.

Medicaid, along with the Children’s Health Insurance Program, serves around 79 million low-income individuals, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with disabilities. Republicans are looking to add onerous work requirements to Medicaid, transition to block grants, impose spending caps, shift more financial responsibility onto the states and cut more than $2 trillion from the program over 10 years.

The other prime target for federal spending cuts is the Affordable Care Act. Republican lawmakers with no health care plans want to introduce high-risk participant pools, reduce federal subsidies and discourage enrollment in the ACA. Key features of the ACA will expire at the end of 2025, which allows Republicans to make big cuts by doing nothing. ACA enrollees will see out-of-pocket premiums increase by an average of more than $700 a year, or 79%. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 6.9 million fewer people would be enrolled without the subsidies. The cost savings to the federal government would be $335 billion over a decade. The human and health costs for individuals and families would be enormous. Undermining the ACA will make Americans sicker and poorer.

There are policies that could that could help us meet the essential needs of our people while reducing and stabilizing the nation’s debt. Cutting wasteful military spending, an improved Medicare for All health care system, fully funding Social Security, and fairer taxation, including a wealth tax, would be a good start. However, Trump, Musk and DOGE have chosen to put the nation through hell in order to further enrich billionaires.

The dictionary definition of kakistocracy is “government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens,” or “government under the control of a nation’s worst or least-qualified citizens.” Kakistocracy captures our dysfunctional political moment. The disastrous plans and policies described above hurt individuals and the nation. They are being carried out while a legal edifice of authoritarianism is being constructed under the cover of a feigned populism that fails to address legitimate needs and grievances. Ivo Daalder — chief officer of the Chicago Council of Global Affairs — writes that his major concern, a concern I share, “is not that liberalism has lost its ability to offer solutions but that populism’s failure will lead to repressive consequences by the very strongmen who rode the populist waves to power.” In other words, a grave danger is that as things unravel the architects of the unraveling will blame others for their failures and exploit them to further enhance their abusive power.

The Department of Government Efficiency has no legal mandate to implement its recommendations, which require congressional approval. This means that just a few Republican members of the House and Senate could impede both the rise of authoritarianism and the disastrous consequences of proposed budget cuts. They need to hear from all of us and soon. There’s still time to get out of DOGE.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is emeritus professor of justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas.