Is The Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE Thing Destined To Fail Even Worse Than Twitter Has Since Musk Bought It?

Former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney talked with Piers Morgan about the Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE efforts, which he thinks are doomed before they start. “I don’t think they can do much on their own. They don’t have a lot of statutory authority. I was the last person, by the way, who was in charge of government restructuring and I failed miserably because everybody was against me. The House, the Senate, even most of the agencies. I remember the secretary of defense was against the things the president wanted me to do.”

Musk and Ramaswamy were on Capitol Hill yesterday to share their ideas with members of Congress. Before the meeting, Jake Sherman, Melanie Zanona and Andrew Desiderio reported that “Musk claimed he could cut ‘at least $2 trillion,’ although without saying how or over what time period. Trump has shown no interest in overhauling entitlement programs. In fact, Trump has proposed cutting taxes of Social Security benefits. But Medicaid funding is one likely target. Slashing discretionary spending, which amounts to roughly one-fourth of overall federal spending ($1.7 trillion out of $6.8 trillion overall) can’t yield enough savings to eliminate the deficit without enormous political fallout for Republican members and senators.”

The trio of reporters wondered if Musk and Ramaswamy “want to cut Pentagon spending, [noting that] GOP defense hawks vigorously defend every last penny sent to the Pentagon— and have done so for years.” MAGA Mike “conceded that he has no idea how Congress will process any spending cuts that DOGE suggests. Johnson said he hasn’t thought about whether he’d try to pass a bill to give DOGE-backed proposals guaranteed floor consideration without amendments in the House and a filibuster-proof vote in the Senate, as Congress did with the so-called super committee in 2011. Johnson added that he wouldn’t ‘say now what’s on or off … the table’ when asked if Pentagon cuts are in the cards. Here’s the bear case, as described by a senior Republican aide:

“Two people who know nothing about how the government works pretending they can cut a trillion dollars, both with decent pulpits to preach from, and the ear of an unpredictable president? Disaster. The only good thing is that at some point they’ll overpromise and get bounced by Trump. But until then… disaster.”

Rank and file members— including at least one conservative Democrat, Jared Moskowitz (FL)— want to be part of the “cutting waste and fraud” efforts and have joined a DOGE caucus. And progressives Ro Khanna and Bernie are interested in seeing if they can help Musk and Ramaswamy cut Pentagon bloat. On the other hand, MAGA Mike decided to show Marjorie Traitor Greene a bone by making her chair of a new House Oversight subcommittee to work with DOGE. Not even Moskowitz is taking that seriously. Jamie Raskin noted that “[N]ow a noted student of American government, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, will chair a subcommittee to work with two unvetted billionaires who stand to receive billions more in government contracts and subsidies from the government under Trump. That’s why Democrats will stay focused on waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. The government belongs to the people, not the billionaire oligarchs.”

Yesterday, Robert Kuttner reported that “Once the cutting gets specific, grave problems arise and one part or another of the Trump coalition will resist. Democrats, if they do their job, will have a field day pointing out how valued government benefits are being sacrificed to finance tax cuts for billionaires… The problem [with Musk’s DOGE effort] is that most of the big-ticket items provide valued benefits to the middle class, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Affordable Care Act subsidies. Fully $5.8 trillion of the $6.75 trillion federal budget is spent on Social Security, health care, defense and veterans’ benefits, and interest on the debt. Put another way, you could cut everything else in the budget and not get close to $2 trillion. Trump is a better politician than Musk. In the same way he revised his stance on abortion, he has backed off cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Obamacare. He might try to repeal Biden’s more generous Medicaid spending. But taken as a whole, the American welfare state is so miserly that there are scant savings available from further slashing spending for the poor. Trump has also spoken of clawing back unspent Biden infrastructure and local aid money. The problem with that is twofold. First, many subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and other industrial-policy support have gone to underwrite new production and jobs in red states. These projects are just getting up and running. If Trump tries to abort them, politicians in those states will scream bloody murder... As both parties look forward to the 2026 midterms, Trump’s tax and budget program will do almost nothing for the grumpy disaffected voters who put him in office, and quite possibly leave them worse off.”