After several months of cutting government contracts, grants, leases and workers, Elon Musk seems to be realizing what budget nerds have long known: His oft-repeated goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget through executive action alone is extremely difficult.
In a cabinet meeting this week, he appeared to offer a more modest target, saying he expected to achieve savings of $150 billion. There was always a good reason the original $1 trillion goal was out of reach: The part of the budget that Mr. Musk has been mining for savings was expected to total only $950 billion next year.
Cutting $1 trillion from that part of the budget would eliminate that category of spending entirely — including nearly every nondefense government worker, most of the veterans health care system and all spending on medical research from the National Institutes of Health. And he’d still be short.
“Cutting a trillion in spending is not just rooting out waste, fraud and abuse,” said Zack Moller, the director of the economic program at Third Way, a center-left research group. “It is a fundamental rethinking of the role of government in the United States.”
By executive order, Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is limited to cutting this part of the budget, with exclusions for immigration enforcement and public safety.
The entire federal budget, of course, is much larger than $1 trillion. But a combination of political priorities and legal impediments means Mr. Musk and his team have left major categories of government spending largely untouched so far.
Mr. Musk’s precise plans are hard to determine based on his limited statements at the cabinet meeting. The DOGE team did not respond to ques...
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