Almost everyone agrees that the federal government has become this bloated sample that must be shortened to size.
The massive bureaucracy, attacked by some as evil, is absurdly overstant and wastes massive amounts of money.
What President Trump It does to try to reduce the size of the government, is popular as his billionaire budget lasher, Elon Musk, not IS-and many of the court fights are likely to be resolved to his advantage.
But the comparison is turned upside down when real people feel the impact. And the media are starting to emphasize sad cases of destroyed people. And Republican legislators Start to object to the cuts that come home.
That is why it is so difficult to lower the federal budget. It is not like going to SpaceX and firing a number of software. The political pressure can be intense.
Almost every program in the federal budget is there because a group convinced the congress at some point that it was a good idea. There are noble sounding causes cancer research, help to veterans, subsidies for farmers.
Farmers are even threatened by the near-abolition of USAID while most people hate foreign aid, food programs offer a crucial market for American farmers, many of whom are now stuck to spoiled or loans that they cannot repay.
The Elon Musk-Stunder deportation of the Trump government of the American Agency for International Development (USAID) attracted the anger of many in Washington and beyond, especially because farmers, and by expansion, the food provision can depend on the program. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Now there is a lot of game playing that continues with government programs. Let’s say, because of the argument, agencies can cut one of 10 employees without damaging their core functions.
Everyone who has looked at the endless cycle of conferences, conventions, training confabs, office renovations and the like knows how much fat there is in these budgets. When you throw lucrative payments to well -connected contractors, they are fools.
But then Agency officials Come fire, they immediately get on that cutbacks will immediately harm the poor and oppressed, or people who work in the working class who live a salary for salary. In the past it was called the Washington Monument Defense, the idea that any attempt to reduce financing for the Ministry of the Interior would cause the immediate closure of the memorial.
NIH, for example, does a world -class research that benefits the country. But the battle between Musk’s Doge and the Institute focuses on how much is spent on indirect costs.
Musk says that his goal is “the overhead that is loaded on NIH subsidies from the shameful 60 percent to a much more reasonable 15 percent.”
But one NBC story State Kop: “NIH reductions can block medical progress for life -saving treatments, experts say.”
The piece quotes Theodore Iwashyna, a doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who say that his “father had pancreatic cancer, and the care plan developed for him only existed because of research funded by organizations such as the NIH.”
Iwashyna says that the overhead is needed for “computers, whiteboards, microscopes, electricity and caretakers and staff who keep laboratories clean and organized.”
Alabama Senator Katie Britt, whose is $ 518 million in NIH fairs, mainly at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, increases objections. The conservative Republican told a reporter that she wants the administration to use a “smart, targeted approach” in order not to jeopardize “groundbreaking, life -saving research”.
Doge has to ‘cut’ deeper and must ‘keep cutting’ to succeed, says Kevin O’Leary
The examples are Legion. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has asked the administration not to limit the financing for diversity programs among the American Indian tribes.
Like the New York Times states it“Some Republicans” have wanted “Carve -Outs and special consideration for agricultural programs, scientific research and more, even when they encouraged Mr Trump’s general approach.”
The Doge team of Musk seems to use a method for meat axis. Why dismiss hundreds of FAA technicians and engineers, just a few weeks after the fatal aircraft crash on Reagan National Airport, when there is already an important shortage of air traffic controllers?
Doge does not seem to take prisoners with a “meat axis” approach to lower government spending. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty images)
FEMA, who is already thinly stretched after the forest fires of Los Angeles and the floods of Kentucky, is preparing for the dismissal of hundreds of probation workers, reports the Washington Post. Such employees, who have been with the government for one or two years, actually have no rights.
But zero has been made to judge them. Some were told that their performance was the problem, but showed the post their evaluations. “Above completely successful,” someone said, for a dismissed GSA employee. “An excellent year, consistently exceeding expectations,” said the assessment for a dismissed NIH employee.
But viewed from a different perspective, buy the paper in the place of residence and other points of sale the idea that federal employees should have a term for life. Everyone in Washington knows that it was virtually impossible to dismiss such employees before Trump, even for the reason.
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Southwest Airlines, on the other hand, has just announced a reduction of 15% of his business workforce. Nobody hurred to interview the dismissals, because this kind of contraction is routine in the private sector. But the ethos of Beltway is that federal employees are entitled to their job.
Now intellectual honesty requires observation that even radical cutbacks on the federal payroll do not have much impact on the $ 840 billion budget deficit or the federal debt of $ 36 trillion. The majority of the budget consists of Social securityMedicare, Medicaid, Defense spending and interest on the debt.
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Can Elon Musk and Doge make at least progress when eradicating waste, fraud and abuse? Maybe. But the level of pain that is inflicted to ordinary Americans, also in red states, and the natural tendency of politicians to protect locals against that pain, and the ruthless media spotlights on suffering, become a huge obstacle.
