Reducing the size of the federal government has long been a major goal for conservatives. However, since the New Deal, the government has actually expanded, much to the frustration of figures like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. In fact, conservatives haven’t been able to shrink the government much, sometimes actually contributing to its growth. But President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is different — it is one of the most aggressive efforts to cut government spending in recent memory.
DOGE brings to this libertarian ambition an unprecedented method to cut the size of the government. To the department, efficiency is not just about spending cuts — it’s about firing federal workers and trimming programs wherever the government has the power to do so. So far, these cuts have been made with relatively little pushback. According to Politifact, out of six polls conducted, four showed that DOGE was unpopular amongst respondents while two showed split public sentiments. There’s been vocal opposition to the department at town hall meetings with Republican congressmen, but it’s unclear whether these critics are Trump supporters or just Democrats and Independents who were unlikely to support these cuts anyway.
The most visible example of DOGE’s methods has been its cuts to the United States Agency for International Development. It cut the number of employees at USAID from about 10,000 people to about 300 and has saved around $60 billion through cuts to various forms of foreign aid.
While governments should definitely cut wasteful spending, the waste that DOGE has so far targeted won’t make a big dent in the deficit. A better place to look for savings is in subsidies like the ones passed under the Biden administration such as the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act. Goldman Sachs has estimated that the IRA set aside $1.2 trillion worth of incentives for renewable energy, even though private investments in renewable energy have been growing in recent years and solar power is now cheaper than oil and coal. The Farm Bill, which expired in September 2024, gave $1.5 trillion to the agricultural sector. DOGE should push Congress to not renew it since a lot of its money goes to big corporations that don’t really need it, and subsidies can lead to waste as seen with the cheese cave in Missouri, where they store 1.4 billion pounds of excess cheese.
These subsidies have an even bigger problem — they encourage companies to lobby the government for more money. On top of that, the government often adds more policies to protect these subsidies. Take the corn subsidy, for example. Corn is one of the most heavily subsidized crops in America. To deal with the surplus corn created by these subsidies, the government imposes tariffs on cane sugar so that companies use high fructose corn syrup, rather than cane sugar, in their products. High fructose corn syrup then gets added to countless products in the U.S. This is why Coke in America tastes different from Coke elsewhere. The issue with high fructose corn syrup is its positive correlation with Type 2 diabetes, which contributes to higher health costs for Americans. So, this one subsidy on corn ends up requiring more policies to support it, which makes things worse for everyone by costing both the government and the taxpayer more time and money.
Besides subsidies, DOGE could also focus its cost-cutting efforts on less sensitive and less effective departments like the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Housing and Urban Development was founded back in 1965 to make housing more affordable, yet 60 years and $1.6 trillion later, the number of homeless people in 2024 was 771,800, 18.1% higher than in 2023. According to the National Association of Realtors, housing prices are the highest they have ever recorded. Given that a huge part of this housing mess has to do with overzealous state and local planning regulations, why does the federal government have any role here? It’s an entire department whose main purpose is better served by state and local governments that have more tools to deal with the housing crisis. While it does feel like the federal government could help, it is a problem that was caused by states and thus needs to be addressed by states. Federal money is better spent fixing FEMA rather than fixing a crisis over which it has little control.
While one could raise taxes to close the deficit, there are problems with this approach. Large increases in taxes, such as the ones that are needed to close the deficit, hurt the economy by increasing business costs and reducing incentives to work more. As a result, generated tax revenue would end up lower than expected because of the resulting lethargic economy and lower productivity.
As the deficit continues to increase, it has become clear that government debt has grown too large to ignore. Since massive tax increases are not a viable option, cutting federal spending is the only way to go if we want to maintain a solvent government and reduce our debt. DOGE has valid aims in mind when it tries to cut spending, but so far it has mainly looked at small targets. If it wants to truly achieve its goal of cutting government spending, it needs to target larger objectives.
