Why It’s So Hard to Cut Government Spending in the First Place
Businesses have to be very flexible because if they lose too much money, it may be difficult for them to survive. So, if business is booming, they may add new employees, give out a big Christmas bonus to employees, acquire another company, or put more money than normal into research and development or marketing. On the other hand, if the economy is struggling or they’re having difficulty making a profit, that same business may have to let people go, forego bonuses, pass up potential acquisitions, and cut back on their R&D or marketing budget. Surviving comes first and quite frankly, stockholders don’t want to just see survival, they want to see big-time profit and growth.
On the other hand, the government is not like this. Government spending is more like a broken spigot that you use to water your plants. You twist it on, and the water comes out. You water your plants and then… hey, wait, it doesn’t twist back in the other direction. There’s no way to stop the water from coming out. Warm, cold, night, day, summer, winter, drought, or monsoon, the government keeps pumping out an ever-increasing amount of water.
Why is this?
It’s because the system, at every turn, is primed to increase spending and make it nearly impossible to cut back.
As a starting point, the baseline budget for the federal government goes up about 7% per year PLUS INFLATION. In other words, we have a system that essentially guarantees that we’re going to spend more money every year no matter what. Of course, government agencies also try to spend every dime they get and then some to ensure that they can make a case to get some of that incoming taxpayer money. Since more money means more power, more influence, and potentially higher salaries for bureaucrats, there’s very little incentive to cut costs. Combine that with a pro-government culture, a reluctance to rock the boat, and a knowledge that the amount spent is going up regardless of performance and there’s very little reason to try to be responsible with taxpayer money.
So, what typically happens if a new department head or someone like Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) comes in trying to cut costs? Well, the bureaucrats aren’t going to be cooperative. They’re going to slow-walk everything. They’re going to try to spend weeks or months delaying things with complaints, meetings, and pedantic questions. This is a bigger problem than it might seem because many of these agencies have arcane jargon and extremely outdated computer systems that make it incredibly difficult to really dig into the numbers and find where the waste is happening:
On top of this, it’s not as if there’s just one government agency that’s a problem. There’s waste, corruption, useless bureaucrats and duplication of effort spread all across the government at every level. That means you have to go line by line, agency by agency looking for things like this:
If you want to know why DOGE needs to shut down whole agencies or bring in teams of young programmers to find out what’s really going on, this is it. The improper use of taxpayer money is pervasive, and the bureaucrats aren’t going to cooperate in ferreting it out or getting rid of it.
Of course, finding the waste to cut is one thing, but actually making those cuts is something else entirely.
Not only does the Democratic Party generally have zero interest in shrinking government or getting rid of waste, but the majority of the pigs also feeding at these troughs are liberals. They’re liberal bureaucrats, they’re NGO’s staffed by liberals and they’re liberal groups that funnel taxpayer money back and forth to each other. In other words, all these billions of dollars are flooding into a giant liberal ecosystem that puts the money into promoting liberalism, providing jobs for liberals, and helping liberals get elected.
All of these people are going to fight like hell to stop the government from getting rid of waste and corruption. That’s because the waste and corruption are going into their pockets and the pockets of their friends and political allies. That means they’re going to file lawsuit after lawsuit to try to slow things down. It also means that they’re going to freak out, they’re going to lie about what’s happening (They’re getting ready to cut your Social Security and Medicare!) and their toadies in the media are going to back them up.
On top of lying, they’re also going to play up what I recently brilliantly heard called, “The Hostage Puppy” at every opportunity:
You’ll see Democrats and the media roll out sad story after sad story, that may or may not be true, to explain why saving taxpayers billions is bad. This is a great example of how it works:
Oh no! 300 million dollars’ worth of medicine is going to waste! This is so terrible! Those poor people… except, for one thing, this is all bunk. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the expiration dates on the boxes read 2026 and 2027. Of course, if we want to take it a level deeper, we might ask why the hell a country that ran a 1.8 trillion dollar deficit last year is shipping 300 million dollars’ worth of medicine to East Africa in the first place or why, even if what Chris Coons said had been true, no one in that country was competent enough to distribute needed medicine without American money making it possible. Charity is a good thing, but as the saying goes, it begins at home. Why should we literally be going into debt to send billions of dollars all around the world?
Similarly, we run into one last large problem. That being the people getting the graft, the corruption, the waste, and the dubious grants have every incentive to fight tooth and nail to protect the money flowing into their pockets because it’s an enormous sum to them. If you get a quarter of a million dollars to do some DEI job or put on a play about a trans carpenter in Serbia, that’s a LOT OF MONEY to you. If your NGO gets 10 million dollars from the government, that’s a huge sum. However, no single wasteful or corrupt expenditure is a huge deal to taxpayers. Let’s say DOGE cuts a program that saves a billion dollars. That’s a staggering amount of money, but it also comes out to less than $3 per American citizen. Does all of it add up? Absolutely, but no one cut ever matters as much to the public as it does to the people getting the money.
This is why it has seemed so impossible to cut government spending in the past. It’s why, to make headway, Elon Musk has essentially had to move fast, break things, and unleash a team of twenty-year-old number nerds who can get right into the data to make any progress. Ultimately, a lot of what DOGE will be able to do will be decided by the courts, but you have to think the Supreme Court is certainly going to acknowledge that the President of the United States has a right to audit, weed out corruption, and cut spending in agencies that are under the control of the Executive Branch. Time will tell how it plays out, but we’re lucky to have the richest man in the world working for free to try to help get the almost unlimited amount of corruption, waste, and bureaucracy in our government under control. Elon Musk may be the only person on earth right now with the gravitas, technical expertise, and managerial experience to make it happen and the fact that Donald Trump somehow managed to get him deeply involved is nothing short of a miracle.
How is it fathomable that the taxpayer has no say in where our tax dollars are spent? The check I write to the IRS most years is money forcibly taken from me and thrown into a huge vat at which the pigs feed themselves and whomever else they choose.
How about a supplement to my tax return that gives me a selection of choices of where my tax payment is spent? I suppose that supplement would require a forklift to move and who knows how long to go through. But, maybe it could be reduced to 2 pages that feature only choices that are absolutely necessary to fund the government as outlined by the Constitution. Each item would show the percentage of my payment that would fund it. There would be no discretionary selections to choose from, but if one wishes to fund a pet item they could write it in and add however much they would like to donate to it to their required tax payment.
The fact is, the American taxpayer should DEFUND the Government!
You've given us another shareable issue of Culturcidal, John. The wasteful spending habits of politicians and unelected decision makers seems to be unbreakable. And we are almost persuaded that a conscious decision was made to NOT upgrade computer systems throughout the departments and agencies reporting to the Executive Branch. Sure seems to be helpful to the bunch who're gumming up the works for the DOGE staff--delay, delay, delay.