100% percent of any Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) savings should be returned to taxpayers. This shouldn’t even be a debate, but sadly it will be since neither side of the ideological spectrum grasps why the federal government is so large, and why it can so easily borrow.
For now, it’s useful to state the obvious: it’s not the federal government’s money. The money was spent with taxpayer dollars, and the money borrowed was borrowable exactly due to lender trust in the present and future ability of the U.S. Treasury to collect sizable amounts of the ever-increasing earnings and wealth of the U.S. citizenry.
This is important as Elon Musk talks of a plan to return only 20 percent of potential DOGE savings to taxpayers. The bet here is that he could be convinced otherwise.
To see why, stop and think about what happens when an individual or business pays off a lot or a little debt. The act of doing so doesn’t shrink opportunities to borrow, rather it expands them. Our federal government is no different: Congress spent and borrowed the money on the backs of taxpayers, so let’s not allow any presumed savings to expand the ability of Congress to borrow even more in the future.
From there, stop and consider the much bigger danger of DOGE finding substantial savings, only for the federal government to pocket 80 percent. What’s obvious is that what’s not spent is freed up for all-new government programs that invariably start out small before inevitably growing bigger as the constituencies reliant on the program grow and grow.
All of which leads to the question of whether DOGE will work. The speculation here all along has been that it will not simply because government isn’t, nor can it be a business. By extension it can’t be efficient.
From there, there’s the obvious constitutional factors about power of the purse that will ultimately walk back much of what Musk is valiantly trying to do. Neither Musk nor President Trump controls spending, and this is a good thing even if you’re a big fan of both. That is so because they won’t always be in government. Congress controls spending. Let it. Let it own its mistakes.
Beyond constitutional limits along with the oxymoron that is government efficiency, the view here is that Musk’s main problem is that he’s coming at this the wrong way. We don’t have spending problem thus the debt, rather we have a too-much-tax-revenue problem now and in the future, hence the debt.
As with individuals and businesses, debt is an effect of growing trust in future incomings. Translated, the more dollars that any entity is expected to collect in the future, the easier that entity will find borrowing.
Which is why Musk – if he really wants to have a lasting and substantially positive impact on the size and scope of government – must direct his energies (and those of the president he serves) toward drastically reducing present and future tax revenues. If so, watch as Treasury’s ability to borrow shrinks such that existing programs must get by with less, and new programs never get started.
For now, it’s no reach to suggest that any savings achieved by DOGE will be clawed back by the courts, regime change, or both. If we want real change that manifests itself in limited government, we must put to bed the monolithic view on the left, right and supply side that the path to reducing the size of government and its debt is more tax revenue. A more dangerous and wrongheaded viewpoint would be hard to find.
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