In his frenetic efforts to increase government “efficiency,” Elon Musk has usurped Congress’s rightful authority over spending while almost certainly breaking a wide variety of federal laws.
Donald Trump’s top donor — who has not been elected to any office, or confirmed to any Cabinet position — has shuttered the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a government body codified by Congress in 1998. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had no legal authority to do that: A federal agency cannot be dissolved absent an act of Congress. He did so anyway.
Musk has also secured access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, and has suggested that he wants to cancel disbursements he deems wasteful or fraudulent, a move that would effectively transfer authority over spending away from Americans’ elected representatives and toward the world’s richest man.
Meanwhile, DOGE has put large numbers of civil servants on administrative leave, in a seemingly illegal violation of congressionally mandated civil service protections. And he has offered virtually all federal workers a buyout in exchange for their resignations, an offer that he does not have the authority to make, according to legal experts.
“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School, said of Musk’s machinations in an interview with the Washington Post on Tuesday.
To justify this illegality, Musk’s defenders have cited the urgency of addressing America’s debt crisis. In their telling, the costs of allowing the federal deficit to swell is so great, we should tolerate DOGE’s extraordinary measures.
“We have $36 trillion of national debt growing at a rapid rate,” the billionaire investor Bill Ackman posted on X Tuesday. “All Americans must therefore make their voices heard loud and clear about how much they support DOGE, Elon and our president’s efforts to help our country. We cannot let DOGE fail as our country is rapidly on the path to insolvency.”
There are many reasons to reject this argument. The United States is not going to become “insolvent” any time soon. And preserving the rule of law is likely more important to our nation’s long-term well-being than slashing federal spending.
But the most fundamental problem with Ackman’s position is that DOGE is not doing anything to meaningfully reduce America’s long-term debt.
Musk and Trump have evinced little interest in either substantially cutting Social Security and Medicare or in dramatically increasing taxes. Yet the primary drivers of federal deficits are tax cuts and the rising costs of financing older Americans’ retirements and health care needs.
The Trump administration has no plan for addressing this reality. To the contrary, the president’s fiscal proposals would add $7.75 trillion to the national debt over the coming decade, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Budget.
DOGE, meanwhile, is ostensibly focused on rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending. But it is not mathematically possible to offset entitlement spending or tax cuts by eliminating such waste (and identifying fraudulent or wasteful disbursements in advance is easier said than done).
Musk has claimed, without evidence, that there is $1.7 trillion in annual waste and fraud — a figure that nearly matches the size of the federal deficit. Yet when DOGE has actually tried to name specific examples of “wasteful” spending, it has offered up programs that have negligible budgetary costs.
We should not sacrifice the Constitution on the altar of deficit reduction. But that isn’t even the trade that DOGE is tacitly offering: Rather, Musk’s team is asking us to let it break federal laws, so that it can very slightly trim federal spending — before Trump’s tax cuts increase the deficit by trillions of dollars.
The deficit is rising because America is getting old, not because woke bureaucrats are robbing us blind
The federal government does lose a significant amount of money to improper payments and fraud annually. According to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the government made $200 billion in overpayments in 2022. The GAO has also estimated that the government loses upward of $233 billion annually to fraud.
This is a substantial sum of money. And were the Trump administration to find some way of bringing both those figures to zero, that would be a huge achievement.
But detecting fraud and overpayments is not easy. And gutting the federal workforce will make those tasks all the more difficult.
More fundamentally though, fraud and overpayments are not the reason why America’s debt will become rapidly more burdensome in the coming decades.
The absolute size of the national debt does not tell us much about its sustainability. What matters is the relationship between how much our country owes to private investors (after subtracting out our government’s assets) and the overall size of its economy.
That ratio is on track to jump by roughly 18 percentage points over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). This increase is not the result of steadily rising “waste” or “abuse.” In fact, our economy is poised to grow faster than all discretionary spending over the next 10 years, according to CBO projections. As a result, such spending will contribute nothing to the impending increase in America’s debt-to-GDP ratio.
The actual drivers of America’s rising debt burden are the escalating costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Currently, those programs have a combined fiscal price of over $3 trillion a year.
But their annual cost is poised to rise sharply in the coming decades for two reasons. First, as the vast baby boomer generation continues aging into retirement, a larger share of Americans will be collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, while a smaller share will be paying into them. Second, health care costs are poised to grow faster than the economy, in part because older Americans require more medical services.
This does not necessarily mean that the United States must cut public benefits for senior citizens. For one thing, if Congress had never enacted tax cuts under George W. Bush and Trump, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio would be declining today. For another, it is possible that the United States will be able to comfortably weather a large increase in our debt burden, particularly if technological advances minimize future inflation.
But if you believe that 1) America should enact trillions of dollars in new tax cuts and 2) that the national debt is a serious problem — as the Trump administration claims to think — then there is no alternative to slashing Social Security and Medicare.
DOGE’s examples of wasteful spending add up to a tiny fraction of the federal deficit
Of course, Trump has sworn not to cut Social Security and Medicare. And Musk has suggested that DOGE can resolve the supposed debt crisis through the elimination of waste and fraud. But unless he believes that Social Security payments are a form of wasteful spending, this simply isn’t the case.
Indeed, Musk’s own examples of wasteful public programs indicate that such spending has a tiny impact on the national debt. This week, DOGE provided conservative outlets with a list of allegedly wasteful and abusive projects carried out by USAID. These programs collectively cost “millions of dollars,” according to Fox News.
But trimming “millions” from a $6.75 trillion federal budget has no meaningful impact on America’s long-run debt trajectory. The fact that the United States gave $32,000 to Peruvian artists working on a comic book “featuring an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues” may or may not be regrettable. But such spending has no bearing on our nation’s fiscal health.
What’s more, the administration has apparently misdescribed some programs, in attempt to make them appear more frivolous than they actually are: Fox News noted that one policy was described as funding “tourism” in Egypt but actually involved the provision of “potable water and wastewater services to hundreds of thousands of people” in North Sinai.
This is not the first time that one of DOGE’s examples of outrageous federal spending failed to survive scrutiny. Previously, it asserted that the United States has spent $50 million on condoms for the Gaza Strip, a claim for which there is “no evidence” according to the Associated Press.
Musk has recently cited some concrete examples of purportedly wasteful spending outside the domain of foreign aid. But these have similarly had price tags in the millions. For example, Musk lamented that the government provided 37 FDA employees with subscriptions to Politico Pro for a total cost of $517,855. It is unclear whether this outlay should be considered wasteful: Politico Pro is a preeminent trade publication that provides unique information on policy and governance issues, which is why myriad lobbying groups pay for it. But whatever one thinks of the policy, cancelling such subscriptions will do essentially nothing to offset the cost of Trump’s impending tax cuts.
In truth, the Trump administration has given us no reason to believe that it cares about reducing the national debt. As Brian Riedl, a fiscal conservative at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, wrote Tuesday: “I don’t get excited when DOGE cancels $1 billion in govt contracts. Or saves $3 billion in federal workforce reductions out of a $7,000 billion budget. Not when Trump and Congress are also preparing to add $800 billion more annually in proposed new tax cuts and spending.”
The question is not whether we’re willing to give Elon Musk unconstitutional powers so that he can save America from a debt crisis. Rather, it’s whether we wish to give him such powers so that he can bend the government to his whim (while continuing to collect billions of dollars in federal contracts from the administrative state he is unaccountably reshaping).
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