Examples of government waste are a dime a dozen these days. From the debacles over the $640 toilet seats in the Pentagon and the Air Force’s $1,300 coffee mugs and little-known Agricultural Marketing Service using the even-less-known Watermelon Research and Promotion Act of 1985 to “strengthen the position of watermelons in the marketplace” and the Consumer Product Safety Commission renewing its efforts to conduct the Child Strength Study to test children aged three months to five years so that they may, “obtain child strength measures for upper and lower extremities and bite strength.”
Budget hawks will use humor to point out the millions of dollars that are wasted on things like these. Cutting these programs is clearly beneficial to the American people, and importantly, do not meaningfully impinge on the ability of the agency to carry out its job nor do they come with many downstream effects. Does anyone really think that Air Force pilots will be unable to fly their planes without these $1,300 mugs, that Pentagon officials will meaningfully suffer using cheaper toilet seats for the commode, or that the American consumer will forget about watermelons if not for the Agricultural Marketing Service’s efforts?
But what about when the cuts are deeper and more fundamental than these? What if, instead of finding cost savings to a given task, the entire agency created to handle those tasks were eliminated? With the recent closure of USAID, this question has come into view. Now, it looks like the Department of Education may be up next.
The use of humor is an effective tool of communication. But there also needs to be a sobering reality check in all of this. While eliminating things like USAID and the Department of Education may (and I want to emphasize the use of “may” there) score some political points, the reality is that the economic wins may not be as impressive as we might think.
Budget Effects
To begin, let’s look at the overall projected savings of eliminating USAID and the Department of Education. The most recent data suggests that USAID managed about $44.2 billion, though even the Congressional Research Service admits that determining USAID’s precise budget remains difficult due to their entanglement with the US Department of State. Meanwhile, the Department of Education has a current budget of $103.1 billion, which is down considerably from their budget during the pandemic.
Eliminating these areas entirely and replacing them with nothing would amount to a total savings of $147.3 billion. While this amount of money is gargantuan to us mere (fiscal) mortals, it pales in comparison to the overall federal budget for this year of $7 trillion. These savings amount to just two percent of the federal budget.
By way of comparison, as of this writing, since the start of the fiscal year in October, the national deficit for this year alone already exceeds $700 billion. We would have to eliminate USAID and the Department of Education almost five times just to avoid the deficit spending that has already occurred this year. Over the course of the next eight months of this fiscal year, the CBO projects that we will add another $1.2 trillion of deficit spending, bringing this year’s total deficit to a staggering $1.9 trillion. For some context, it took the entirety of the nation’s history through 1981 for the national debt to hit $1 trillion. Congress will doubt double that in this year alone. Just to avoid adding to the national debt and to bring about a balanced budget that President Trump recently called for, we would have to eliminate these programs, or those of comparable size, thirteen times over.
A Dose of Reality
The problem with the government is not that it is inefficiently run, nor that there are billions of dollars of government waste that we could find and eliminate. The problem, as Edmund Burke once said, is with the thing itself. For far too long, government has expanded in both size and scope. Finding wasteful spending like expensive coffee mugs and toilet seats, a bloated budget for federally supported marketing efforts, etc. only sidesteps the real issue, which is that as it stands today, the government plays far too large a role in too many aspects of our lives.
With a budget of $7 trillion, the federal government already accounts for almost a quarter of all economic activity in the US. Adding in state and local governments, which contributed another $4 trillion, and “government spending” writ large accounts for over a third of all economic activity.
If we want to see real steps taken to cut government spending, we must first reduce the scope of government activity. Unless or until DOGE starts recommending eliminating responsibilities from the federal government (which Congress would have to approve), there is little hope of even a balanced budget this year, let alone returning the nation to a healthy fiscal path.
