There has only been one modern economic calamity in the U.S. worse than the Great Recession of 2008. That was the Great Depression of 1929, which finally ended after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, on 1941.
Unfortunately, Congress and the White House have not balanced the budget since 1998. Every president and Congress since then equally share blame for our national debt of $36.5 trillion, which is increasingly unsustainable.
Our nation’s debt is extremely dire, which truly forsakes future generations of Americans. Hopefully, the U.S. Treasury will never declare bankruptcy. However, if the Treasury ever does, the U.S. dollar would no longer be the world’s reserve currency, which would drastically reduce our standard of living for decades.
Right now, every one hundred days our national debt unbelievably increases by “$1 trillion about every 100 days.” This is both dire and disgraceful.
According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the “Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that interest payments will total $952 billion in fiscal year 2025, and rise rapidly throughout the next decade — climbing from $1 trillion in 2026 to $1.8 trillion in 2035. In total, net interest payments will total $13.8 trillion” until 2035.
This is both dire and disgraceful.
According to the CBO, the Department of Defense budget will be approximately $850 billion in 2025. That is clearly $102 billion less than the current annual interest paid on the national debt, which is unprecedented since 1945.
This is both dire and disgraceful.
Despite all the potential pessimism about our nation’s debt, there is now hope for guarded optimism. That is because of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which President Trump created by executive order on January 20.
The primary aim of DOGE, which is headed by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and X (Twitter), is to eliminate federal fraud, waste, abuse and theft along with modernizing all governmental technology and software.
According to the DOGE clock, Musk and his small “cadre of [twelve] young engineers” from Silicon Valley, who increased their numbers to “almost 100” on February 12, have found significant cost savings for taxpayers in four weeks totaling over $49.09 billion as of February 17.
Musk’s ultimate goal is to find $2 trillion in cost savings by July 4, 2026, which will celebrate the semiquincentennial or 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. DOGE is not a permanent federal government agency, and expires on that date. If Musk succeeds, it will be a grand celebration of both economic austerity and political independence.
One present example of gross federal waste is that it costs 3.69 cents to manufacture and circulate a one-cent penny. That is almost four times than what the penny is worth, which makes no common sense. According to the U.S. Mint’s annual report for 2024, it “issued over three billion pennies … at a loss of about $85.3 million.” That would be a tremendous cost savings to the American taxpayer in eliminating the penny like Canada (2012) and Australia (1992).
DOGE will hopefully save the taxpayers a minimum of $2 trillion by auditing and recommending cost savings to the president for such government agencies or departments as the IRS, USAID, FEMA, Transportation, Education and numerous others. However, I predict that one of the biggest cost savings will be found at the Pentagon, which has been notorious for wasteful $500 hammers, and “never fully [having] passed an audit” since 2017.
Intransigent and apoplectic Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) biggest fear is that unemployed tens of thousands of unelected bureaucrats, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and live primarily in the surrounding suburbs of Maryland, northern Virginia, southern Pennsylvania and elsewhere along with Washington D.C., may soon significantly decrease Democratic votes in all these states and the district.
The fears of a steamrolled Schumer and other far left Congressional Democrats are greatly justifiable during the next four years, especially with the 2028 midterm elections just eighteen months away.
According to Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), Schumer’s nemesis in the Senate, DOGE has so far discovered such expenditures in U.S.woke imperialism as $2 million needlessly spent on “sex change” operations in Guatemala, $20 million squandered on Sesame Street in Iraq, and $1.5 million wasted in Serbia to promote a DEI agenda, which are all miniscule dollar amounts compared to other wasteful spending revealed since January 20.
Elon Musk has recently discovered that 150-year-old deceased people are still collecting Social Security checks! Last week he stated that FEMA may have “mismanaged nearly $10 billion during the COVID pandemic between 2020 and 2023.” Last week it was also discovered that FEMA, which officially specializes in disaster relief, sent an unauthorized $59 million to shelter illegal migrants in luxury New York City hotels in 2024.
Congressional Democratic opposition to DOGE is financial lunacy because our national debt is both extremely dire and disgraceful because the U S. is slowly edging closer toward bankruptcy.
Senator Schumer and House Minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who truly have a gift for hyperbole, mistakenly believe that DOGE has somehow created a “constitutional crisis,” which the U.S. has really not experienced since the Civil War. That is not only absurd but a blatant lie and political propaganda. In fact, Democrats are only experiencing a political crisis because Trump is merely exercising his executive duties under Article II in the Constitution.
Since last November 5 the Democrats have been rudderless and leaderless living in a financial fool’s paradise accustomed to printing trillions of dollars under Biden while ignoring the fact that they lost the 2024 election by not winning one of the seven battleground states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania. The Democrats decisively lost because of the border crisis, national debt, 35% food inflation, fentanyl, sanctuary cities, DEI, Afghanistan and the belated weak candidacies of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Consequently, they failed to win the coveted White House and a plurality in both the House of Representatives and Senate.
Now the Democrats are desperately criticizing and hysterically opposing both President Trump and Elon Musk because the latter is exposing horrendous billions of dollars in fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption by unneeded, unaccountable and unelected federal bureaucrats since the 1990s.
It strongly appears that much of the D C. “swamp” and bureaucratic deep state or a “government within a government” are finally going to be drained under President Trump.