Bryan Zepp Jamieson
April 12th, 2025
G. Elliot Morris, formerly one of the guiding geniuses behind the late, lamented 538 website, came up with this tidbit today: “According to the Hamilton Project data, the U.S. government has spent $2.17 trillion as of April 10, 2025, at 7:00 p.m. ET (the data, which comes from the Treasury, is updated in near-real-time). That is just shy of a 6% increase over spending on the same date in 2024 when the feds had spent “just” $2.05 trillion at this point in the year. This puts the US federal government on track to spend $8 trillion this year, barring other budget changes…”
As odd as that stat is in light of ElonTrump’s chainsaw ‘cost-cutting’ measures, it only tells a small part of the tale. In fact, trillions of dollars have been lost over the past two months to waste, fraud and abuse, and even though Trump had to scurry back on his “Liberation Day” tariffs in light of a potential total economic collapse, the wholesale destruction will continue.
The slashes to government programs, big and small, have been capricious, arbitrary, and often cruel. Thousands of on-going projects have been stopped in their tracks, even though the money for them had already been allocated and spent, meaning that money—hundreds of billions—has been thrown away. Just the ongoing research programs that just got torched alone were in the billions.
They’ve gutted thousands of departments by taking a very systematic and subtle approach: just fire anybody who a) is on probationary status and b) has a vowel or a consonant in their name. This meant every promising new hire who hadn’t been there two years yet, all temporary employees, and anyone who had just been promoted for doing a superior job but whose promotion came with probationary status. With no regard to capabilities or functions.
Courts have ordered thousands of employees unfired, and many of those returned to find their chairs, their desks, and their computers all gone, either trashed or dumped at fire sale prices.
Many of the most important (and popular) government programs, including the Department of Education, NOAA, NASA, Department of the Interior and Social Security are being gutted. That last one, which makes up about 10% of national economic income for the general public, is teetering and in danger of collapse. They want to privatize the Post Office, which means thousands of non-profitable rural post offices will close even as the price of sending a letter explodes ten-fold.
I’ve actually had right wingers whine that we wouldn’t be complaining if a Democrat did to the government what Trump is doing. Typical of MAGAts—they love to howl about what victims they are as they rape and bully everyone around them.
Fact is, Democrats DID cut government spending, and even balanced the budget. This was in Bill Clinton’s second term, with vice President Al Gore overseeing the government efficiency task force. It was called “Reinventing Government” It eliminated what Elaine Kamarck, administrator of the program, said was “more than 400,000 federal positions between 1993 and 2000 through a combination of voluntary departures, attrition and a relatively small number of layoffs.”
Hundreds of departments were merged or eliminated, and the savings were so great that the Clinton administration had the first (and last) balanced budget since 1968. The day George Bush Jr took office, newspapers and economists where rhapsodizing about “surpluses as far as the eye can see” and there was serious talk of retiring the national debt by 2010. Of course, Republican fiscal fecklessness and greed, serving the notion that the national treasury should be the plaything of the very rich, eliminated the surpluses and instead created record floods of red ink, which their propagandists assured the public was the result of “Democrat spending.” It was a lie, but it was repeated endlessly.
And Reinventing Government slid into the memory hole, partly because it didn’t support the fascist narrative, and partly because it worked exactly the way government was supposed to work: democratically, with decision-making and responsibility shared between Congress and the executive, and with time taken to determine what jobs and projects served a good purpose and which were just accumulated fat. It worked so well hardly anybody even noticed it.
So the next time some wankers moan in self pity that people just hate right wingers, it isn’t politics or factionalism; it’s disgust for greed, incompetence, capriciousness and viciousness. The Democrats used competence, honesty, and good faith. The difference is night and day. People don’t hate Trump and Musk for “saving money”; they hate them because they are hateful people who are destroying the country and selling it off for parts and at our expense.
Even though Trump had to back off on his massive tariffs folly, the damage is already nearly unrecoverable. Not just the incredible waste and incompetence of his “cost-cutting”; the extraneous damage inflicted.
The bond market is teetering. US bonds are the “safe haven” for investors during market crashes, something that New Deal economics took out of our lives which Reaganomics restored. Stocks tank, you invest in bonds and wait it out.
But bonds depend entirely on “The Full Faith and Credit” of the United States, and under this administration, nobody trusts that government. As far as good credit goes, the US might as well be Zimbabwe. And the bond market—nearly $30 trillion in size—relies entirely on trust in the US government.
You hear a lot about China owning a chunk of that, and it does: about $1.8 trillion. About 6%, more or less. A small but significant share. (Most of the bond market is money the US owes to itself).
Trump is going out of his way to antagonize and even insult the Chinese with his mindless bluster. If China tanks the bond market, they will take great economic damage. But the US would be ruined. It would take decades for the nation to recover, and it wouldn’t look anything like the US that we all enjoyed in the 20th century.
It’s clear Trump isn’t running the show: his plutocrats, including Musk, are. But they aren’t noticeably smarter or more competent, and often mistake greed for wisdom. Most of them have the compassion and knowledge of Charles Montgomery Burns, Homer Simpson’s boss. Two words: Howard Lutnick. And he’s not even the worst one: far from it. Trump’s Secretary of Education is talking about using that thinking computer thingie for educating the kids, what was it she called it? Oh, yes, “A-One.”
Hope she didn’t pick Hewlett-Packard for the computers. Everyone knows HP and A One are competitors.
Sheesh.
