America COMMENTARY


Is DOGE Enough?


We need serious statesmen to emerge to prevent a fiscal calamity.


P BY JEFFREY H. ANDERSON


resident donald trump’s department of Government Efficiency is perhaps the most wel- come wake-up call for the federal government — and its obscene spending habits — in decades.


It is refreshing to see many overpaid, underworked, often-vacationing federal employees fretting about whether their cushy jobs will disappear, and to see at least one branch of the federal government working to rein in our massive deficit spending. All of this is long overdue. Yet it remains to be seen whether DOGE will help jump-start a serious and sustained effort to restore fiscal sanity, or whether its high-profile efforts will wrongly convince Americans that enough has been done, and that we can stop worrying that the federal government is bankrupting the country. If the former happens, it will be an extraordinary and much-needed development; if the latter, it will provide further evidence that, as Lincoln warned us nearly two centuries ago, if our republic is to be destroyed, it will be destroyed from within. There are already signs that DOGE might not be able to


deliver as much as originally promised. The branch of government on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the one with the power of the purse, will eventually have to start doing its job. Congress has irresponsibly put so much federal


spending on autopilot that we’re racking up historic deficits without legislators having to vote on most of that spending. Just how out of control is our autopilot spending?


Consider that the Congressional Budget Office says that in fiscal year 2025, the federal government will collect $5.163 trillion in tax revenues and will spend $952 billion on net interest payments on the debt and $4.228 trillion on so-called “mandatory” outlays for a total of $5.180 trillion


in autopilot spending — spending that Congress doesn’t control through the usual appropriations process. In other words, per the CBO, our autopilot spending


alone will eat up all the revenues that the government collects this year, leaving it with a $17 billion shortfall. That’s a $17 billion deficit before Congress votes to


spend a single penny on such things as national parks, federal highways, or even national defense. So much for the left’s claim that defense spending is fueling our deficits. Nor are our deficits a result of the federal government


having been too shy about taxing the American people. In real per capita dollars, which adjust both for inflation and for population growth, the federal government collected more than three-and-a-half times as much money in 2021 as it did in 1947 (the first full fiscal year after World War II). Interest payments on the debt are now larger than


our entire discretionary defense budget. So, if not for the profligate spending of prior generations, we could cover our defense costs with the money we now send


Congress has irresponsibly put so much federal spending on autopilot that we’re racking up historic deficits without legislators having to vote on most of that spending.


24 NEWSMAX | JUNE 2025


MUSK/SHUTTERSTOCK AI / CAPITOL/DOUGLAS RISSING©ISTOCK PROTEST SIGNS/ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES


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