Elon Musk and DOGE might not save a penny of US spending

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want to talk a little bit about the work that Doge is doing, which is increasingly the subject of a major misunderstanding among the Maga people. You are now starting to see the lists of programs that Elon is finding and cutting and so on and so forth. Used to say that’s not a good use of money. The money should be spent in this other way, and it belies a complete misunderstanding of how our government functions. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. During a recent press briefing, Caroline Levitt, Trump’s press secretary held up papers and said, Look, here’s 1d, e, i, program. We found its fraud. It was $30,000

for D E, i. Now, of course, it’s not fraud. It might be a program you don’t like. It might be a program that doesn’t align with your political agenda, but it’s not fraud. Fraud has very clear definitions, but there’s two aspects to this that are important. Number 130,

$1,000

is a lot of money to a household, but it is nothing when you are talking about a $7 trillion economy. And it’s not about we shouldn’t save big and small, but it’s if what you’re finding is 30 grand of A, D, E, I program. It’s not even worth the time it takes to identify it. When you look at the military industrial complex, which they said they were going to look at and cut defense, they haven’t cut it. They’re probably going to increase defense. So the drop in the bucket nature of this is one thing, but here’s the more important misunderstanding, every time you see some amount of money for a dei program, which is scapegoated as useless and just silly, but a silly waste of government spending, you’ll hear things like, why aren’t we just going to take that money and give it to veterans? And there’s two problems with that. Number one, a lot of them are hypocrites, because if you go to them and you say, hey, Republicans, we’ve got a lot of homeless people, including homeless veterans. We’ve studied it, and we figured out it’s actually cheaper to give them a free house, give them health care and give them groceries, rather than have folks

sort of displacing businesses by their presence on the street, which businesses don’t like, filling up emergency rooms because they don’t have primary care doctors. So all they can do is go to the emergency room, slowing down emergency rooms and participating in behavior that we don’t like. You go, we I hear you guys. You don’t like that. It’s cheaper just to give them this stuff. They go, no, no, no, no, that’s a waste of money. We can’t spend that. We can’t afford that. What about money for this other thing? So the first problem with we should take the DEI money and give it to veterans or whatever you care about more is that when the opportunity comes up to actually fund those programs, they don’t want to do it either they say it’s wasteful spending. But the most important misunderstanding here is that the process of budgeting, proposing a budget, approving a budget, obtaining the money, dispersing the money. These are year long cycles, and there is no mechanism to take 30 grand saved from a dei program, and give it to anything. And I would even go further, even conceptually, we run a deficit right now in the United States. We have, for a very long time, Bill Clinton had a surplus. Trump said he was going to get rid of the deficit. He never did. It actually got bigger. We run a deficit if you take a budget on paper and cross off a couple things that money doesn’t go anywhere. It just means the deficit is a tiny bit smaller, which they claim to support, fine, right? Support the smaller deficits. But because of that, it’s even more remote and fantastical as an idea that if Elon starts slashing dei programs, anybody’s going to get any money, it would at least theoretically, just cut the deficit by a little bit. So do they not understand this? I don’t know. I think some of them do. I think Trump and Elon Musk probably do understand that if they cut things on paper, they don’t end up in anybody’s pocket. It might, if you genuinely do it, which these are recommendations, they don’t have to be accepted by the departments. That’s a whole other story. They might just cut the deficit. A tiny sliver, 30 grand in the deficit is nothing. I do think that there are lower information Republicans who don’t get it. They don’t understand that the money doesn’t come back in that way, and they are cheerleading in they actually think that Elon Musk is saving a lot of money. I would actually question right now whether the cost of the entire Doge infrastructure is even saving a penny. REL.

To what they’re actually getting off of the books of the budget should be studied. We don’t have the answer, but the idea that we’re going to get money back thanks to what Elon is doing, not at all, not at all. You.