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Donald Trump hasn't yet taken office, and yet the co-leader of the DOGE department, Elon Musk, has already waved the white flag—at least partly. A month ago, there was much talk of slashing $2 trillion from the federal budget. That was... unrealistic, to say the least, since the entire discretionary outlay each year is just $1.7 trillion. Yesterday, in an interview on eX-Twitter, Musk conceded as much.
This is not to say that the little DOGE-y has rejoined us in the real world, however. His new target is "about half that," which works out to $850 billion. That's not happening, either, although if he introduces a decimal in there—say, between the 8 and the 5—he might be onto something. Alternatively, he could replace the "b" in "$850 billion" with an "m." That might work, too.
Yesterday—not by design, mind you—the Biden administration provided a useful reminder of the intractable challenge that Musk and his friend Vivek Ramaswamy face. The White House announced that 24 million people have signed up for healthcare under the ACA this year. That brings the total number of people insured by the ACA to 45 million, and means that there are more people insured right now than at any point in U.S. history.
The ACA is one of the things that Musk, Ramaswamy and Donald Trump intend to target. As wealthy men, they don't see why working- and middle-class people should be getting government help with health insurance. However, the federal government's total spending on the ACA is just $91 billion. Could we imagine a world where someone who actually knows about efficiency (certainly not Musk and Ramaswamy) could put that under the microscope, and get it down to, say, $90 billion? Sure. But a savings of $1 billion is rather less than $850 billion. And going much beyond that will mean either cutting benefits, or kicking people out of the program, or both.
A sizable chunk of the folks insured by the ACA are Trump voters. So, any cuts to the system would harm them while doing virtually nothing to fulfill Musk's promise. Even if the entire system was scrapped, that would still save less than $100 billion, which is also rather less than $850 billion. And the tradeoff is that 45 million Americans would be furious. This is why the DOGE department is nearly as much a fantasy as the acquisition of Greenland. Even Elon Musk is slowly starting to see it. (Z)