Relying on a chart from USA Today and a Reader's Digest article on weird things the government spends money on, Elon Musk's analysis can only be intended to distract.
Either corporations can pay their fair share, or we can start cutting the military budget. Analysts are pointing out that Musk's tweeted-out plan can not work; there isn't enough for the government to cut. Most of the items he's pointing at, like a Superbowl ad for the census save money elsewhere, but there is no effort to get to any sort of understanding — just a mad rush to vomit out fables his mad troll base to repeat.
DOGE, the incoming Trump administration advisory panel headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has been posting on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, about the federal government's spending. The posts have featured a mix of facts and figures, including those drawn from a USA Facts chart and a Reader's Digest article on "11 Bizarre Things the U.S. Government Actually Spent Money On."
Washington Post
Get ready to see our National Parks sold off. When they Musk talks about getting used to living with less, maybe they mean less Medicare and food.
The remainder of the budget, wrote Kessler, is everything else: Medicaid, food aid, grants to states for various partnerships and projects, scientific research, critical agencies like the National Weather Service, and the list goes on. For DOGE to meet its promise of balancing the budget absent new tax increases — and Trump has pledged to cut taxes on top of all this — pretty much the entire rest of the federal government that isn't defense and retirement programs would have to be eliminated.
DOGE has put forward a number of examples of government spending it considers to be wasteful, Kessler continued, but aside from the cost of these programs being negligible, many of them are more useful than Musk is making them sound.
For instance, DOGE criticized a $2.5 million Super Bowl ad for the Census — but in fact, Kessler noted, "for every 1 percent increase in mail-in responses [the Census Bureau] received, it would save $85 million sending workers door-to-door to collect information. So what appears to be a waste of money was intended to reduce spending over time."
RawStory
