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Trump just announced his plans to go forward with a Milei-style AFUERA campaign radically cutting government spending and jobs. And because nothing in government ever gets done without increasing the government first, the plethora of American Departments to do Stuff is joined by one newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency. Apart from proving once again that we are living in the dankest timeline, the DOGE will also give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy something to do.
Musk has quite the track record when it comes to trimming fat but it remains to be seen whether those skills are transferrable.
Culture War angles are plenty. It would be trivial to craft a narrative either of a hostile, "fascist" takeover of Our Sacred Democracy or of a laptop class that siphons resources from everybody else via the instrument of an ever-expanding bureaucracy consisting of bullshit sinecures for the credentialed.
But the more interesting angle is that this is a fight between the executive and the entrenched bureaucracy. Were I a betting man, I am not sure where I would put my money. Others have tried and failed to cut the bureaucracy to size. But maybe it takes a chainsaw-wielding maniac to get the job done. How is Milei doing, by the way?
I highly doubt Musk will be able to make much progress. He might be able to bag a few high profile wins in a few places at best, but he's not going to get anywhere near the $2 trillion mark he set for himself. There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed before he'd inadvertently start chopping off bones that people care about and would complain about loudly, and Trump isn't going to let Musk cause too many bad Fox news cycles before he snaps and it becomes a battle of the egos.
If there's anywhere to improve government that could simultaneously reduce costs and improve outcomes, it would be paring back the army of contractors the government has leveraged as a bandaid when people want to get something done, but R's slashed budgets so much that nobody in the government has the competency to do them. But undoing that would mean hiring more government employees and probably paying them more as well, which strongly goes against R vibes and is thus unlikely to be considered.
Wut
Ahem
I'm talking about money to government employees, not all federal outlays (which are dominated by boomer entitlements like Medicare and Social Security).
That's not a problem of budgets, though. That's just a head count. Of course, it's also highly confounded by general employment in the denominator; surely, you wouldn't say that looking at the spike in that plot in 2008 is because they suddenly decided to hire a bunch more government workers. And oh wait. Ahem, I think they say.
I can't find it right away, but Tyler Cowen recently shared an image showing the extremely different composition of the federal workforce over the years when binned by location on the general schedule; far more folks on the higher end of the schedule. This is likely much more directly in the control of the bureaucracy. Additionally, if your complaint is that entitlements are getting in the way, I'm not sure who's to blame for that.
These are both complains about how the budget is spent, not that the budget has, itself, been slashed. The latter just simply isn't true.
If you only take the raw number of employees across time then it's confounded by population growth and labor force participation. It's like not adjusting a monetary metric for inflation. So sure, the total headcount has only dropped slightly from the 90s, but if that's put into context then it's clear that the federal bureaucracy has been quite constrained as a percent of the overall labor force.
In terms of of whether using the term "budget" is correct here, you're slightly more correct but I'd say you're being pedantic. It should have been clear that I was talking about personnel budgets specifically, given the context of the sentence. Also, for the record "slashed" probably is less true than "constrained, especially in regards to inflation", but I digress.
Where is your evidence that the personnel budgets have been constrained, specifically, especially given that I mentioned a significant shift in the composition of the workforce by pay scale?
Here
The total percent of government spending that's going to its employees has dropped precipitously, from about 35% in the 60s to ~18% today.
That again suffers a denominator problem. That other sorts of spending have exploded doesn't tell us much about what you're making claims about. Perhaps something like this would show the precipitous decline that very neatly corresponds to some notable R actions taken? (Click max x-axis, I don't remember how to embed that into the link.)
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