DOGE’s supposed goal is to identify $2 trillion in savings and reduce the size of government—and the deficit—by slashing federal waste and redundancy. (It’s been tried before, with limited success.) Based on their activities and statements, Musk and Ramaswamy would accomplish this by gutting the federal workforce, eliminating certain agencies, slashing regulations, ending selected entitlements, and, as a corollary, privatizing as much as possible as quickly as possible.
For starters, the DOGE bros have proposed killing veteran’s health benefits, Pell grants, Head Start, and the Bureau of Prisons—which simply means the government would spend its “savings” on contracts with private prison companies, and what could go wrong? They also seek to eliminate the National Institutes of Health, which would be a disaster for US leadership and innovation in science, because the NIH funds most basic biomedical research—work that brings about lifesaving drugs and procedures and vaccines, which, whatever you may think of them, have saved millions of Americans from gruesome deaths.
But suppose, for a moment, that DOGE’s mission is earnest. There’s a far richer target that nobody, indeed not the DOGE boys, has been talking about: wasteful tax breaks. These wouldn’t be spending cuts, technically speaking, but they amount to the same thing, as evidenced by the fact that the government calls them “tax expenditures.” And what is more wasteful, honestly, than giving considerable breaks to people who don’t need them?