DOGE: The Memeification of Government
doge, national debt, the government accountability office, and how the US spends money
President-elect Donald Trump has spent the last week announcing cabinet nominations. Among them, he has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A play on the crypto dog token DOGE coin, this new commission is ordered to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The DOGE, however, would not have the power to do any of those things. It is making wild promises that seem highly implausible, rallying the American people behind a misguided notion of government spending, and disregarding current systems in place to keep waste, fraud, and abuse in check.
This is the memeification of the Federal government, where newly formed commissions can cause crypto memes to skyrocket. I hope you enjoy.
National Debt
The Federal Government spends more money than it makes. Its primary source of revenue — taxes — does not bring in enough dollars to cover all the expenses of running a 400 million person country. As a result, we run a budget deficit.
Whatever the outstanding amount is between what the government collects in taxes and what the government spends in outlays, it must make up for with debt. To raise this debt, the government issues bonds. You yourself can go to the United States Treasury Direct website and purchase these bonds directly from the government, and you’ll make a reasonable return on that debt from the interest that the government pays you!
The last time that the U.S Government ran a budget surplus — where it collected more than it spent — was in 2001, well over two decades ago. Moderate budget deficits can certainly contribute to growth and fast track productivity, but the United States has racked up an astounding amount of debt.
Every year that they run a deficit, the total national debt grows. The concern is that there are interest payments to be made on that debt, so whenever the debt grows, the government needs to finance more debt in the following year to help cover the interest payments — it snowballs pretty quickly. They just recently crossed the $35 trillion dollar mark, and just this year the federal government will have to allocate $1.1 trillion dollars, or 12% of their total obligations, towards paying the interest on their total outstanding debt.
Those interest promises, it can be largely assumed, will be paid for by taking on additional debt. That’s where the snowball begins. Something, somewhere is not working as it should be.
DOGE
That’s where the Department of Government Efficiency is tasked to come in and “fix” the problem. I love the idea of an organization that encourages fiscal austerity, but there are a number of ways in which DOGE is just a flashy stage act, with a whole lot of empty promises.
It’s Not A Department
First and foremost — the name. The Department of Government Efficiency is not a department. It is at best a commission, and at worst just two dudes who really like to tweet. Welcome to the politics of performance.
You might think I’m just arguing semantics here — I’m not. There are currently 15 executive departments, ranging from Transportation to Defense to Education. Government Efficiency is not one of them and will not be one of them unless Congress signs off and budgets for it.
The President does not have the power to create new departments because the President does not have the power to spend — what’s known as the Power of the Purse. That falls with Congress, and it is a constitutional mandate that Congress is the one to do the spending.
The most recently created government department is the Department of Homeland Security, which was created through the Homeland Security Act of 2002, passed by Congress after the attacks on 9/11.
Congress allocated $19.5 billion dollars to Homeland Security on the year of its inception, something only Congress can do. All that to say, the President cannot wave a magic wand and create the DOGE.
If Only We Had An Auditor
For the “Department” of Government Efficiency to work efficiently, you would think that it would act somewhat like an auditor. It would dive into certain government organizations, monitor and document where it sees waste, fraud, or abuse, and then report back to Congress — who controls the budget — in order to reallocate resources and force department hands to reduce the said waste, fraud, or abuse.
Fortunately for the United States, this auditing mechanism exists. Let me introduce you to the Government Accountability Office1. From them directly:
GAO, often called the "congressional watchdog,” is an independent, non-partisan agency that works for Congress. GAO examines how taxpayer dollars are spent and provides Congress and federal agencies with objective, non-partisan, fact-based information to help the government save money and work more efficiently.
They follow the money, and get it back when it isn’t being used properly. In FY2024, they returned $67.5 billion dollars to the government. Over the past six years, the government has made back $123 dollars for every $1 dollar that they’ve invested in the GAO. That’s pretty damn efficient.
I think the disconnect here is that the Trump rhetoric really villainizes government spending. Yes, an ever growing deficit is bad, but that does not mean all government spending is bad. I get the sense that lots of people would read the above and go “the GAO only returned $67.5 billion dollars? Didn’t the government spend $6 trillion?” I think the way that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy talk about government spending paints the picture that the government does — quite literally — nothing. It creates the illusion that the $6 trillion of government spending is ALL waste, fraud, and abuse.
That’s why when Elon and Vivek say that they’re looking to cut $2 trillion dollars from the government2, some people don’t bat an eye. But they should bat an eye. They should bat a lot of eyes — largely because cutting $2 trillion dollars does not seem to be in the realm of legal possibility.
What The Government Spends Money On
The reason that DOGE can’t cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget — aside from the fact that they have no say in congressional spending — is because of how government spending is structured.
Government spending is broken up into two buckets —
Mandatory spending
Discretionary spending
Mandatory spending is spending that is dictated by prior law. An example of this is Social Security. The government can’t just decide that it no longer wants to pay out social security recipients. These payments are dictated by prior law, and must be adhered to.
Discretionary spending is basically what’s on the chopping block. This spending is voted on every year when Congress goes about its appropriations process. Discretionary spending is only 28% of the budget, and half of all discretionary spending is defense spending. This only leaves about $900 billion dollars that you could reasonably and legally touch. We can map this out using this wonderful infographic from 2023:
What the government spends money on:
Social Security — 21% of Federal spending
Medicare and Medicaid — 24% of Federal spending
Disability and Other Income Security Programs — 7%
We’re already at 52% of the budget — this is all legally untouchable — let’s continue:
Interest on Debt — 10% of Federal spending
Defense — 13% of Federal spending
The above items total to 75% of the Federal budget. There really is only so much room to cut. That’s where my confusion around DOGE comes in. They certainly know that they have no legal jurisdiction over the vast majority of the Federal budget, yet they’re making public promises to cut into those slices anyways.
For example, Elon Musk’s PAC on Twitter shared this photo saying “DOGE will fix this.”
Implying that these are all line items that they could slash. But $659 billion of the $900 billion that they are implying to cut is interest on our national debt — the second line item. They can’t cut this! It’s constitutionally protected! So I think they’re purposefully spreading misinformation to get the people on their side. That’s not to say we don’t have a debt or spending problem, we certainly do, but this seems to be weaponizing it in all the wrong ways, and that’s unfortunate.
And this whole DOGE thing rides off the back of a literal crypto dog coin meme, which to me just feels a bit demeaning?
The one silver lining is that there are hopes that having Elon as the face of this whole thing could make it “cool” to work for the government. He has clearly made some pretty incredible hiring decisions for his companies, and hopefully that carries into whatever DOGE will turn out to be.
I do hope, for the sake of the country, that this leads to some positive outcome. I’ve found it difficult to be optimistic, especially given the conflicts of interest behind the two people running DOGE, but I’m rooting for its success.
How Does This End
I want to end this by saying that the solution to closing the deficit gap is very simple — we need to either raise taxes or reduce spending, or both. We know this, we’ve known this for a long time.
In 2010 after the Great Financial Crisis, President Obama created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — often referred to as the Bowles-Simpson Commission. The country was in crisis, and this was a step taken to ameliorate the financial hole the United States was digging itself into. Bowles-Simpson basically said that we need to increase taxes and we need to reduce spending. The problem is clear, just as clear as it was back in 2010. It’s the same exact problem. But Republicans didn’t like Bowles-Simpson because it raised taxes, and Democrats didn’t like it because it cut spending. But these are quite literally the only two solutions to the problem at hand. So it’s time Congress sucks it up, and does something about this.
We don’t need a Department of Government Efficiency. We need comprehensive tax reform. We need to remove the cap on social security tax. We need to reform social security — the program is paying out more in benefits that it’s taking in through tax revenue. We need restructured corporate tax rates. We need to reevaluate capital gains taxes and mortgage interest deductions. We need a better healthcare system.
We need to rebuild TRUST. The Pentagon just failed its seventh audit in a row. That’s not okay. We need organizations like the GAO to say “hey you’re actually throwing away our taxpayer money”. I don’t see how having the world’s wealthiest man, who owns three highly conflict-of-interest-provoking companies, spearhead a government commission incorrectly named after a crypto dog token and making promises to slash a third of the government, could possibly help the average American. I just don’t see it. This is the memeification of government.
As always, I hope you’re doing well, and thanks for reading.
A special thanks to Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards writing at Bloomberg for being a great resource for all of this stuff!
https://www.gao.gov/
https://www.barrons.com/articles/doge-musk-spending-cuts-tall-order-c76499a0