Literally every single President prior to Trump has been trying to eliminate it. Trump is, instead, eliminating the people whose job is fighting waste and fraud. That’s what the Inspector Generals (you know, those folks who Trump wasn’t legally allowed to fire but did anyway) do.
OK, that’s “million”, with an “m”? Got any examples that are actually costing the government, well, any amount money at all?
Because helping Ukraine out is a great bargain. We get to vastly decrease the military power of our worst enemy, for the low, low cost of money that we’ve already spent and can’t get back anyway. What would be wasteful would be to take all of those weapons that we bought to fight the Russians, decades ago, and just let them sit idle in warehouses.
The Trump administration literally has a plan to offer to pay federal workers to do nothing for 9 months. They are trying to add to frivolous, completely wasteful spending.
The expression “penny wise, pound foolish” dates back to at least 1612, in a book by Richard Burton. It’s not a new idea, that you can waste money in the attempt to save it if you do so improperly.
And he is currently pushing Congress to go further into debt:
Musk may be on a cost-cutting mission. My sense is that he’s trying to figure out how to migrate us to a Universal Basic Income (socialism!) using cryptocurrency, while camouflaging his work through creating lib-rage headlines.
Donald Trump is more inclined to reducing his personal tax load and spending money as necessary to generate lib-rage headlines, so his name stays in the news and he sounds like a strong and powerful leader.
I’m told that setting the house on fire is the best way to get rid of the weeds.
That what you wanted in the first place was the house destroyed and didn’t care at all about the weeds is not to be noted.
The only way to eliminate government departments is to pass laws and, if you believe that they should really go and you have a genuine argument that it’s smart and reasonable to do, then that’s really not an issue - especially if you’re in the majority.
You can make headlines about how you fired everyone on day one but really all you’ve accomplished is to make it more expensive to rebuild everything again in four years. Usually, the next administration just continues what was there before. Here, you’ve got to remake everything that was blown away.
It’s as much eliminating waste as if you were throwing it under your shirt and saying, “Look, it’s all gone!”
This is a good point. DOGE isn’t actually eliminating any spending at all. If they’re stopping payments, but the law mandates those payments, then no money is being saved – it will just need to be paid later. And in addition, DOGE’s illegal activities will cause additional expense in lawsuits and such. Violating the law doesn’t save any money, and usually costs money.
The answer to the thread title question is of course yes.
The Trump administration is, or was, offering almost eight months salary as an incentive to leave government service. I’m pretty sure that most of the employees hoping to get this offer were retiring this year anyway, so even if they are in an overstaffed office, which is somewhat unlikely, it is waste. And it’s what the average person should consider fraud, because the legal limit for a federal separation incentive is $25,000, and eight months salary is more than that for the great majority of federal employees.
Also, if the office, like most, isn’t overstaffed, the work these employees would have done will have to be done by someone else, often at an overtime pay rate. The difference between the basic and overtime pay rate is waste.
Cairo – The United States and Egypt, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), signed a bilateral assistance agreement amendment worth $6 million that demonstrates continued support from the American people for joint U.S.-Egypt priorities. This agreement will increase educational opportunities and strengthen the livelihoods of the people of North Sinai.
The amendment to the North Sinai bilateral assistance agreement supports the Egyptian government’s efforts to spur inclusive economic development in the governorate. Through this agreement, USAID will build on previous investments in North
Sinai including the provision of potable water to 300,000 residents and wastewater services to 100,000 residents. New activities under this amendment will provide access to transportation for rural communities and economic livelihood programming for families.
They are not. Those items were from The White House, and that is not a reliable source.
Cite? And not trump.
Why? And how?
Yep. Once you get those funded, the rest is almost a rounding error.
Yep. Lets get rid of how reagan ruined the tax code. Bring back the 70% marginal tax rate. Stop taxing Social Security and Unemployment. Tax the rich. Upgrade the IRS.
Less that 1/10th of 1%. A nothingburger. Once you eliminate those do you know how far we’d still be in debt? $34 Trillion. You might cut off a billion, max, which when we are talking trillions, remember there are 1000 Billions in a trillion.
The conservatives in this thread are talking about cutting millions here and there. Why don’t they go after bigger ticket items like the CRP program which appears to be in the billions. Conservatives: Swing for the fences and not for the foul line.
That is true. But the US Guv is actually paying people to NOT farm. How isn’t that fraud and wasteful? And they are paying them in the billions for this luxury. Getting rid of CRP will equal getting rid of 34 fake $50M in condoms to Gaza. But, this could be real and not fake like the condoms BS.
Medicare and Medicaid, together, add up to about $2 trillion a year.
I - Republican - suggested to reduce the spending per capita to the same as EU countries, about half. That would reduce the total US budget by about $1 trillion a year.
While this probably can’t and shouldn’t be done quickly since that money is going to support livelihoods, the general things that you would want to accomplish over time to achieve this reduction are:
Create a medical exception for patents where the life of the patent doesn’t start until the pharmaceutical or device is approved for sale.
Eliminate employer backed health insurance (this is likely the key source of American price insanity. Employers dangle high value plans as an incentive, creating a market force to increase price that’s disconnected from value.)
Generate a rating system (similar to how we rate cars for safety) for insurance plans, reviewing the expected years of life expected to be added, given the coverage and costs, and forcing the ratings to be posted.
Provide subsidies to insurers, adjusting monthly per state, giving a flat value per head, such that each state has at least one insurer offering at least one free plan, with no membership limits.
$1 trillion is probably about equivalent to 15 million workers.
I’m not sure exactly what happens when you instantly fire that many people from their job but I can readily imagine it creating millions of homeless people within a few months, followed by a crisis in medicine brought about by homeless violence, addiction surges, etc. and incorrectly matched medical manpower.
Most of the raised price of US medicine doesn’t go to wages, it goes to construction, space age equipment, and pharmaceuticals. If you cut spending, the hospitals are on the hook for their loans to cover their infrastructure. The thing that’s most easy to cut is manpower. Maybe some small offices can move to lower rent locations but I don’t think that would have a large effect on reducing the hit since it’s probably not cheap to move medical equipment around.
I recognize that it sounds all cool to just flip a switch that makes the world right and fair again, and ignore the ramifications. But it’s like feeding someone who has been starved to the edge of death. “Just give them a burrito!” Isn’t the answer. You try that and they’re just as likely going to die because their body can’t handle it.
You’ll have more success and better total outcomes by allowing things to adjust. Some lives will be lost because there’s not immediately 100% coverage. But more lives will be saved because you didn’t drop 15 million people into unemployment, to get your nut on. Doing that also gets people dead.
Triage is the medical practice of deciding how to use what you’ve got to reduce overall death, at the expense of the few. That’s all we’re talking. Livelihoods keep people from needing medical attention.