To hear his administration tell it, the United States is in a golden age of prosperity thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the Department of Government Efficiency’s spending cuts, and the exodus of federal employees. Finally! With all of that dead weight gone and tariff money pouring in, the American people should be positively rolling in dough, right?
Yeah, no. The truth of the matter is that it’s impossible to determine what the government is doing with our money.
Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that neither outside budget experts nor congressional appropriators can determine how much money DOGE saved us all. The $1 trillion in savings that so-called mastermind Elon Musk promised was always illusory, and it’s far more likely DOGE’s antics cost us money rather than saving us any.
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Even DOGE’s own inflated, opaque figure—a paltry $214 billion, or less than one-quarter of what Musk initially promised—is just a nonsense number, pure Calvinball math. DOGE got to some of these “savings” via methods like canceling contracts that did not exist. Musk’s demonic little DOGE minions would simply assign an arbitrary, inflated value that the government might have spent on something, and then “cancel” that and claim big savings.
The one thing that is clear, though, is that the administration has refused to spend billions of dollars in already-appropriated funds, far more than those Trump openly withheld via an illegal pocket rescission at the end of the fiscal year. So, where’s that coin?
Additionally, there should be huge savings from all the federal government employees who were fired or voluntarily resigned. However, we don’t really know what that number is either, thanks to the churn of firing and rehiring that keeps happening. But we have no idea how many people have actually left the federal government, voluntarily or otherwise.
The head of the Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor, bragged that the government would end the fiscal year on Sept. 30 with 300,000 fewer employees. So where’s that money, Scott??
Democrats have calculated that Trump blocked over $410 billion of appropriated funds, but the American people certainly aren’t $410 billion richer. Indeed, it seems like the only people seeing a slice of all this coin are the ghouls who decide to go work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and score huge hiring bonuses.
Oh hey, remember tariffs? They were going to make us so prosperous! Never mind that we the consumers are actually paying these tariffs, so the additional revenue Trump is bragging about is nothing but increased taxation. A couple of months ago, Trump even floated the idea of tariff rebate checks, where the government would give you back some of the money it took away under Trump’s ever-shifting tariff scheme.
Needless to say, those rebate checks have not materialized, but Trump does appear poised to single-handedly shift some of that tariff revenue towards farmers who are struggling under the weight of his policies. Gotta make sure to keep them voting Republican.
Now, with the ongoing government shutdown, things are even more opaque. The administration has decided it will just divert funds from other military appropriations to pay the troops during the shutdown.
This is wildly illegal at any time, but particularly during a government shutdown. The notion that one set of government employees can be paid during the shutdown because Trump feels like it, while everyone else suffers, is ridiculous. Stopping this, however, would require either Congress or the Supreme Court to check the administration’s actions, and they don’t feel like doing so.
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Taken together, this all highlights how far we are down the path to Trump as king. He’s overseen mass firings and undertaken a mass withholding of appropriated funding, ostensibly on behalf of the people and fiscal sanity, but that money just vanished. There’s no accountability, or traceability. And deciding to pay favored groups—farmers here, troops there—is peak personalist regime king shit. Trump is using your tax dollars however he sees fit: doling them out when he feels like it, hoarding them when he doesn’t.
In the end, we should be awash in money. There are hundreds of thousands fewer federal employees. Trump eliminated major divisions and entire agencies. Tariff dollars are rolling in. But none of us will see a dime, and we’ll never even know how much money we’re missing.