When President Trump said on Wednesday that his order to freeze federal spending was about “scams, dishonesty, waste and abuse,” he was echoing promises made by his predecessors in both parties.
Yes, the memo was a sweeping attempt to remake what he calls a “woke” government in his image. Yes, it was part of his retribution agenda to purge the “deep state” of his perceived enemies. And yes, it was an assertion of presidential power that threatened to undermine a core congressional authority — the power to direct federal spending.
But beneath all that, it was also one of the most far-reaching attempts to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.
Mr. Trump’s order was blocked by a federal judge, but the chaos and confusion it caused may make it even harder to achieve his desired goal. Democrats now appear energized to oppose any effort by the president to slash programs, and government unions have issued new statements vowing to protect their workers from cuts. Organizations that receive federal money are now worried and wary.
But there is no indication that Mr. Trump is likely to give up. In a social media post on Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, referred to a series of executive orders signed by Mr. Trump last week, saying that “the President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”
If that is the case, Mr. Trump will be continuing a mostly-failed effort by a long series of presidents and Congress. As measured by the numbers of people it employs, the federal bureaucracy increased by about 12 percent between 1984 (when Ronald Reagan was president) and 2020 (near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term), according to data compiled by the Brookings Institution. During that period, the population of the United States grew faster, by around 45 percent.
The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.
In that same period, the national debt — the total amount that the government has borrowed — grew to $35.4 trillion from $18.1 trillion.
Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Mr. Trump’s memo appeared to be designed less to shrink government and more to “eliminate programs at odds with the Administration’s social and cultural values.” But she said that does not mean the underlying idea was a mistake.
“A similar exercise, however (minus the chaotic release, and including an assessment before changes were made rather than the other way around) would be immensely useful in controlling spending if the focus were on evaluating efficiency and effectiveness,” she said. “A granular exercise like this is desperately needed in as many tax expenditure and spending programs as possible.”
There is a long history of attempts to rein in spending and address concerns that the government is bloated and inefficient.
Vice President Al Gore created and led the National Partnership for Reinventing Government in 1993 in the hopes of making government more efficient, more cost-effective and, ultimately, smaller. Over a number of years, hundreds of government agencies were either eliminated or consolidated, but the effort did little to change the overall direction of the government’s growth.
President George W. Bush, like many Republicans of his day, championed a smaller federal government during his term, but oversaw a period when the government grew under his eight-year watch. In a State of the Union address at the beginning of his second term, President Barack Obama said “it’s not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government.” He, too, presided over a government that expanded.
In part, experts say, that is because despite being a bipartisan goal, the Republican and Democratic parties have grown increasingly more divided about which parts of the government to keep and which to cut.
Democrats have tended to favor social programs, such as education, child welfare, health care, the environment and diplomacy. Republicans — and more recently Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement — have been focused on the border, police and building a larger military. Areas of agreement, or at least compromise, have become more and more rare.
For his part, Mr. Trump has always talked a big game about wanting to disrupt what he calls “the establishment” in part by waging war against the federal bureaucracy.
In his first inaugural address, Mr. Trump hinted at his disdain of the federal government that he had been elected to lead, saying that “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people.”
“Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth,” he added.
By his second inaugural address this month, it was clear that the president’s animosity toward the federal government and its employees had only deepened.
“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency,” he asserted, saying that since he departed the White House four years ago, “we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while, at the same time, stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”
Mr. Trump promised he would “restore competence and effectiveness to our federal government.”
But as president the first time, Mr. Trump was often reminded how difficult it can be to alter the arc of the government. Not counting the military and contractors, the size of the civilian federal work force grew from about 1.85 million employees to about 1.94 million employees. That came about in part because the government hired workers for efforts toward the president’s goals on border security, trade and support for veterans, according to a recent analysis.
The president’s efforts to slash the government this week have been more direct and more blunt. The funding freeze memo was meant to identify large parts of the federal bureaucracy to eliminate if the work clashed with Mr. Trump’s conservative social and cultural views.
A second order, which remains in force for now, offers an early retirement option for employees who don’t want to return to the office after working from home since the Covid pandemic. The administration has estimated that as many as 10 percent of the federal work force might accept the offer. But if even half of that number do, it would be a dramatic reduction in the number of government workers.
Still, Ms. MacGuineas said that even those kinds of cuts would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.
To make a real impact on the debt, she said, “we are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings — Social Security, health care, and revenues — the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.”
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