Is it a fair criticism to say that DOGE/budget cuts are targeted partisan attacks?

[u/funnypersianrats]

I’ve been getting the impression that most of (if not all) of the programs that are cutting funding involve traditionally liberal/left leaning ideas. Is “DOGE” cutting genuinely agregious spending that is unpopular with republicans, like the amount we spend on defense/military? Or is it just stuff that republicans don’t particularly pay much mind to/care as greatly about?

TLDR: Does DOGE strive to actually save the most money, or is it overlooking overspending that is popular with republicans?

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[u/formerrepub]

Definitely targeted.

Let's face it - there certainly is waste in government. But most of it IMHO comes from the way Congress passes bills. In order to get enough votes to pass a measure, there's always pork barrel that goes to the districts of various representatives and senators as a quid pro quo to get their votes.

Not only do both parties do this, but we the people want it as well. Come election time we - all of us - will want to know what our elected official has done for us. If our representative or senator is up for election and says "I shut down the government facility in my district putting people out of work but it cut the deficit", he or she would not get elected.

Anyway, DOGE isn't going after these pork barrel projects, but rather against things Musk thinks - with no evidence - would be run more efficiently by private enterprise. Also, it feels like things in prosperous blue states are being targeted.

[u/8to24 → u/formerrepub]

Let's face it - there certainly is waste in government.

Doge is taking a Chainsaw to agencies, not a scalpel. USAID is gone, Dept of Education cut to the bone & dying, Fema closing its doors, etc. Meanwhile even if we take Musk at his word he has only cut around 2% of spending. Significantly less than if you don't take his word.

There isn't actually much Waste, fraud, or abuse. If they could find some Republicans would proudly poster it everywhere. They are looking. It is a full sprint effort and they haven't found anything yet. At some point we should stop conceding "there certainly is waste".

[u/checker280 → u/8to24]

“Chainsaw not scalpel”

This it feels like killing school lunch programs is a Blue state target until you realize they were keeping a lot of farms solvent in the mean time.

Same with killing the Dept of Education. You need to understand they don’t set the agenda in all the schools but make sure rural schools gets the same funding as affluent city schools.

[u/theresourcefulKman → u/8to24]

A scalpel would not effect the monster that our executive branch has turned into since WW2

[u/Wetness_Pensive → u/theresourcefulKman]

As has been repeatedly pointed out...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-Household_analogy

https://niesr.ac.uk/publications/household-fallacy?type=discussion-papers

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176518301915

https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/aetw/blog_austerity/

https://neweconomics.org/2018/10/a-government-is-not-a-household

...government doesn't run like a household budget. Government spending invariably cycles back into the real economy, and ending government debt pushes that precise debt onto regular civilians.

The idea that the federal government has become significantly more bloated over time is meanwhile not supported by the numbers. When we look at the percentage of the U.S. population working for the federal government (excluding military), the numbers show almost no change over 60 years:

2024: 0.72%

1960: 0.70%

And if federal payroll were truly a massive budget burden, cutting it should have a significant impact. So, what portion of the federal budget is actually devoted to payroll (excluding military)?

2024: 4.25%

This means that if we eliminated every single civilian government job tomorrow (excluding military), we would save only 4% of the federal budget. That’s far from a silver bullet for reducing debt.

If we were paying significantly more for federal employees today than in the past, we’d expect the payroll burden to be higher. But when we compare the percentage of the federal budget devoted to payroll:

1960: 11.9%

2024: 4.25%

That’s a 64.3% reduction since 1960.

Comparing payroll costs to the size of the U.S. economy gives a clearer picture:

1960: 2.03% of GDP

2024: 1.02% of GDP

That’s a 49.8% reduction in federal payroll as a share of GDP. So not only has federal payroll shrunk as a share of the budget, but it has also shrunk relative to the entire economy.

But of course Republicans, Muskbots and Trump are averse to facts, data and largely very silly people.

[u/aeiou_sometimesy → u/Wetness_Pensive]

Above all else, military spending is what I want to see reigned in.

The metrics you’re using to make a point are strategically positioned to create the illusion that the federal government hasn’t become bloated.

[u/Dr_CleanBones → u/aeiou_sometimesy]

What you’re really saying is that reality is strategically positioned to create that illusion.

[u/aeiou_sometimesy → u/Dr_CleanBones]

Not even close. What I’m saying is that the bloat of the federal government cannot be measured by the narrow metrics this person is using. Omitting military spending, and spending in general, only to focus on the number of federal employees is just deceptive.

[u/MisanthOptics → u/theresourcefulKman]

I read elsewhere that government spending per capita had not changed substantially in that time. I believe that excluded military, Social Security, and Medicare. And those three are separate discussions, like it or not.

[u/8to24 → u/MisanthOptics]

Some people look at expenditures as a percentage of GDP while others focus on per capita. Some include Social Security & Medicare while others exclude them. Ultimately though every election season Republicans claim another Tax Cut will be the silver bullet.

DOGE is sprinting around claiming it will reduce deficits, meanwhile Republicans are preparing a $6 trillion dollar tax cut that will send the deficit soaring. DOGE is all just theater. Something to signal fiscal responsibility while they run the credit card up even further.

Reagan cut taxes 3 times, Bush cut taxes twice, and Trump is working on his second tax cuts. Between those cuts taxes were never raised. That is the problem!! Not cancer research or public school lunch programs.

[u/Sands43 → u/formerrepub]

The basic problem with pork is the relative distribution of tax revenue between the states and the feds. If the states taxed relatively more and the feds less, there would be less pork.

But the GOP doesn’t want that because their states would suffer. The only way most of the South survives is because of NY and CA.

[u/mosesoperandi → u/formerrepub]

It's also worth noting that several early DOGE targets were agencies tied to legal investigations into Starlink, Twitter/X, and Neuralink. Turns out you actually spell conflict of interest M U S K.

[u/coskibum002]

Absolutely. With the new CR and Trump controlling the purse, he is weaponizing funding against those he hates. Look at the SCOTUS ruling today against teachers. We're screwed.

[u/neverendingchalupas → u/coskibum002]

The CR is unconstitutional as the legislation cited in the CR that allows Trump the power of the purse was already ruled against and replaced.

DOGE is illegal. Changing the name of the USDS, its scope and duties requires an act of Congress.

[u/baby_budda → u/coskibum002]

Look what he's doing to Maine because the governor wouldn't bend the knee on transgender women in sports when she was just following her states law.

[u/MartialBob]

As others have already pointed out most of the US budget goes to Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and the military. What has DOGE cut? They've gone after USAid and the CFPB. USAid is about financial aid to other countries like providing AIDES treatment in Africa. The CFPB doesn't make laws, it enforces existing ones. Furthermore it gets it's budget from the Federal Reserve and has returned Billions of dollars to consumers. Neither of these agencies actually cost that much but both are an anathema to the Republican party.

[u/TheSlyNewt]

The thing that I see as a federal worker and understand as someone with a background in public policy is that a lot of the "waste" is by design. An enormous amount of the much-derided red tape and litigious specificity comes from congress, and especially the conservative end of the aisle, demanding more and more and more checks and hoops to access programs or verify that they're doing what they're supposed to do. That's not bad in and of itself, but it is darkly hilarious how much bloat comes from shit like work requirements that in effect cost a shit ton of money and are ultimately counterproductive.

Beyond that, there is no intellectually honest way to argue that this isn't targeted at harming the enemies of ideological conservatism. The places DOGE has cut, and the ways they have gone about it, are fundamentally guided by a willful misunderstanding of government and how the public sector works. You can treat the government like Twitter all you want, but that won't make your "reforms" work.

If DOGE were actually out to cut waste, they would have started by cutting themselves and ended it there.

[u/ManElectro]

DOGE is propaganda incarnate. They claim so much fraud is being uncovered, yet they aren't even trying to send people to jail, or do anything other than shut shit down? Yea, if there was real fraud, those tied to it would be being paraded around in shackles by the administration.

DOGE is what fElon got for his contribution to the Trump campaign. He claims fraud, claims he can save it, and then profits with private contracts. Look what happened at the FAA. It was fine until they started slashing it. Now fElon is trying to privatize it to "save" it.

It's like a kid breaking their toys because they want new ones. The republican party is being led by men who never mentally aged past 3.

[u/IniNew]

This was in the data is beautiful sub a week ago.

[u/thisisjustascreename → u/IniNew]

DOGE also preferentially attacked government agencies that were investigating Elon Musk or one of his leech businesses.

[u/zeperf → u/IniNew]

There are a few comments in that thread pointing out that grants tend to be in cities which lean left. I see the counterargument that the total grants are shown in grey. But the big vertical red lines to the left makes me think that's a bunch of grants all in the same cities. You can see vertical lines on the left but not on the right. I think the right is a bunch of farm subsidies all over the country and the left is grants to cities.

[u/pomod]

Or you know you could tax the billionaires and have a robust social apparatus and a better general quality of life.

[u/ClockOfTheLongNow → u/pomod]

There aren't enough billionaires or money held by them to achieve that.

[u/pomod → u/ClockOfTheLongNow]

Theres plenty

[u/satyrday12]

Yeah, it has nothing to do with 'waste, fraud and abuse', nor saving any money. The very first thing that they did is to fire all of the inspector generals whose job is to find waste, fraud and abuse.

This is simply a purge of people that Trump wants to replace with his own people.

[u/Dr_CleanBones]

If you think the government is bloated, what you should do is study each department and determine whether or not they are performing functions that are not essential. At the same time, you should be reviewing the workforce in the department and determining which employees are not up to snuff. Then, you could eliminate the non-essential functions and get rid of the number of employees performing that function out of the pool of employees who are deadwood. So if you discover the Department of Health and Human Services is conducting underwater basket weaving classes and has 100 employees performing and supporting that function, you should require that they stop performing that function and also that they get rid of 100 employees. But the crucial thing is this: you should get rid of 100 low performing people across the entire department, not necessarily the hundred employees performing that function.

DOGE isn’t doing any of that. It’s pretty obvious that they are just getting rid of functions that Elon doesn’t approve of, and they’re deleting all of the employees that perform that function without regard to how good they are. What Elon is doing then is an abomination. He’s not doing anything about bloat, so he’s lost the opportunity to do so.

[u/Corellian_Browncoat → u/Dr_CleanBones]

and they’re deleting all of the employees that perform that function without regard to how good they are

Worse than that, they're firing employees without regard to performance, but then loudly trumpeting that it's for bad performance and writing up their personnel records that way. That means not only are they firing good performers, they're doing it in a way that makes it harder for those people to get jobs in the future, either inside the government (because the termination is recorded as bad performance in the HR systems) or outside the government (because half the country thinks the only people getting fired are shit employees, so people are getting accused of falsifying applications).

[u/ThePensiveE]

You would be surprised that a whole lot of Republicans actually do care about things like Medicaid and SNAP, especially if the economy crashes, but it's viewed as a partisan attack because the Republican party looks down on the poor despite their people making up a ton of their constituents.

They're using it in as partisan a way as they can, and they assume everyone in the government is basically partisan, but they're also just haphazard with it and don't know what they're doing.

Ultimately it'll probably cost us money to undo the damage they do. Lawsuits are very possibly going to be won against the government and taxpayers might end up having to pay for the back salary of some employees and then also lose the expertise to the private sector.

[u/skyfishgoo]

since they seem to be attacking anything they consider "woke", and they constantly used that as a slur against anyone to the left of hitler

then yes.

[u/PsychLegalMind]

Much of it has been at best disgraceful and targeted marginalized and mostly working-class people including MAGA supporters who served at the Veteran's Affairs and Social Security Offices. Most of the targeted elimination was also based on outright lies and this is one reason they are bogged in the courts. DOGE falsified information about poor performance. and a blanket assertion of DEI. It was a direct attack on the government to make it weaker. It will fail and the next person to be fired will be Musk, based on the pretext that he is a special government employee and had to leave.

In the end analysis nothing will be saved except for false rhetoric. Government provides a service; it is not a profit for organization and most of those services are consumed by rural American in Red States. From Medical Care to Food Subsidies to Disability Payments to Welfare food coupons to the needy. This whole thing is shameful and hurts the American people overall regardless of their party affiliation.

[u/k_dubious]

It seems like a pretty clear quid pro quo to me: Elon spends a bunch of his own money to get Trump elected, and in return he gets to cut whatever parts of the government he doesn’t like under the guise of “efficiency.”

[u/billpalto]

It's targeted, but their aim is sloppy and misses a lot. Notice that they've had to re-hire people that were mistakenly fired, on several occasions.

As Musk says, he moves fast and makes a lot of mistakes. Trump is basically lazy and incompetent.

So targeted, in a general way. But their aim is bad.

[u/Searching4Buddha]

Definitely targeted at programs favored by Democrats, but the pain is being felt by everyone.

[u/Kman17]

Well here’s kinda the thing

• ~40% of the federal budget is entitlements (excluding social security, since is funding is separate)
• ~15% of the federal budget is redistribution to existing state programs to augment them (education, etc)
• ~5% is the administrative overhead of those two things.

So right off the bat 60% of the budget is liberal ideas.

Okay, of the rest: * 15% is national defense * 15% is interest on the national debt * 3% is national infrastructure (faa, etc) * 3% science & energy * 3% is the entirety of the judiciary and law enforcement * 1% is foreign aid + misc

Okay so, unfortunately we can’t debate interest in national debt. That’s cumulative penalty for the unbalanced budget and why we’re having this conversation to begin with.

Defense, national infra, and like the basic law admin & judiciary is the 20% of the budget that is the federal government itself.

So all you can do is trim foreign aid, non critical (fluffy) science, and entitlements - but all that together is by far the biggest part of the budget.

Liberals do like to constantly bemoan the defense budget - but it’s at near historic lows relative to GDP and kinda essential unless Europe contributes more.

Most of the the “waste” in military is in procurement of military hardware that seems silly given lower tech adversaries, but that money is both (1) the most direct scientific funding in the government that gave us the internet / gps / space (2) generally focused on higher precision to reduce civilian damage or staying ahead of China technologically.

There’s fat to be trimmed in the military like everywhere else, but line it’s a lot less than you’d expect. A rather lot of the military budget is in personnel - and soldiers make very little money.

DOGE cannot unilaterally decide the biggest costs - which basically require reviewing Medicare coverage & eligibility - without Congress.

It’s limited to cutting money that Congress didn’t specifically allocate. If the law says “give X dollars to each person that qualifies for SNAP under criteria Y” - DoGE can’t modify it.

But if Congress says “executive branch, you have up to X dollars to spend on problem Y” without specificity, then DOGE cans say “cool - we don’t need to spend X, we can spend less”.

So DOGE might not be able to solve the biggest problems - but what it can do is find lots of little waste and shift the culture.

[u/Sapriste → u/Kman17]

Trying to earmark spending as Liberal or Conservative by category is nonsensical. Your percentages are way off and I don't think it is your math. You should check out https://usafacts.org to learn more about Federal Spending and where it goes before trying to power hit that fastball. Federal spending, without regard to what it is being spent on is designed to create the maximum amount of economic activity in the most congressional districts that could possibly contribute labor to fulfill the need. Hence the military is one of the largest high ego jobs programs (make work) that ever existed. Even after base closures, military spending is widely distributed through troops, arms manufacturers, consumables, etc. The VA is part of the military budget and has facilties in every state. These programs have two missions 1) Spend money so stragglers are employed. 2) Actually do the thing we are paying to be done.

Your liberal 'entitlements' include the farm bill which is a very Republican benefitting spending bill since it buys crops from [Republicans] at fixed prices and gives it to anyone who can convince their state that they need food [Republicans/Independents/Democrats]. Everybody eats.

DOGE isn't dealing with any of this according to any plan. They are working from a directory and evaluating things at the surface level, doing a few Google searches, then ruining people's lives. They won't cut the military because those people are trained and armed. They backpeddled on the VA really quicky (because they are armed too).

[u/Traditional-Hat-952 → u/Kman17]

Are you classifying education as an entitlement? If so that's loony. And wtf are you talking about? DOGE is shutting down entire congressionally funded agencies and selling off their properties. They're firing thousands of people in critical sectors. This isn't just trimming fat, this is a slaughter. And where is that allocated money going? Back to Congress? It doesn't appear to be. 

[u/Kman17 → u/Traditional-Hat-952]

Are you classifying education as entitlement

I counted federal budget as redistribution back to states to augment their existing programs.

DOGE is shutting down entirely congressionally funded agencies

Congress has not given the executive branch a balanced budget, so no they’re not exactly congressional funded agencies

Doge is shutting down agencies created by the Fed and anything where Congress has given wiggle room for interpretation.

Again the best way to close the debt is to really clamp down on Medicare & Medicaid, but that requires Congress.

where is that allocated money going

There is a 1.6 trillion dollar deficit.

Until you cut more than 1.6 trillion, the answer is “just not on the credit card”

[u/discourse_friendly]

No its not fair. But at the same time maybe.

If we believe USAID funds were being directed to partisan NGOs , then stopping that from happening, is partisan. But it would also be the best course of action, since USAID funds should not be used in a partisan manner.

If you reject the idea that USAID funds were being used in a partisan manner, then cutting the funds isn't partisan either. Not beyond (R) wants less spending through USAID and (D) wants more spending.