Elon Musk Admits DOGE Will Fall Short Of A Trillion In Cuts By Nearly A Trillion

And that's with all the agony these cuts have and will cause.

Here is a riddle for you: When is $2 trillion actually $1 trillion? When it’s $150 billion, that’s when.

That first number is the amount of spending that infected gall bladder Elon Musk claimed he could cut from the American government’s yearly $6 trillion in spending. All he and his radical band of shitposting incels had to do was find all the waste, fraud, and abuse that Republicans always think must be infesting the national budget like bedbugs in a New York City apartment.

That second number, $1 trillion, is what Musk reduced his estimate of spending cuts to when he realized what generations of Republicans have discovered before him, which is that holy shit, there isn’t that much fat to cut in the federal budget without touching Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and in fact over the years spending has already been sliced pretty hard. Maybe we should lower our expectations.

That last number, $150 billion, is what you get to when your expectations have been properly lowered. As Musk admitted to Donald Trump on Thursday without acknowledging how far down he has now set his sights.

From Business Insider:

“Thanks to your fantastic leadership, the amazing Cabinet, the very talented DOGE team, I'm excited to announce that we anticipate savings in FY26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion,” Musk said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

Fiscal year 2026 does not start until October, so these alleged savings won’t even start for another six months. Meanwhile, government spending since Trump came into office in January is up a bit, according to The Wall Street Journal:

Last fiscal year, about 73% of federal spending went to interest on the debt and mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare that operate on autopilot. That amounted to $4.9 trillion.

As anyone from the wisest budget expert to the dumbest dipshit at America’s Greatest Mommy Blog™ could have told the DOGE boys, cutting even $1 trillion in spending would have required cutting pretty much every government function outside of the military and entitlements. And while the thought of doing that might be all that can stir up some perk in Rand Paul’s dusty loins, most Americans like their government services, no matter what members of the House Freedom Caucus might tell the press.

And just think about how much chaos and misery DOGE has caused with the $150 billion worth of cuts it has managed to put in place. Hundreds of thousands of government employees have lost their livelihoods, with more on the way. (Sorry, civilian Defense Department workers, but if your job does not directly support the military’s function of killing lots of people, you may be shit out of luck in the employment department!) Despite Musk’s claim in Thursday’s Cabinet meeting that the cuts will improve service for Americans, the exact opposite has happened, as anyone who has tried to log into the Social Security website or call the agency for help with anything in the last few weeks can tell you.

Perhaps the sorts of cuts they have made can be summed up by this righteous Chris Hayes rant from his show Thursday night:

We’re not actually sure why Hayes is that shocked. The Trump administration has been making a concerted effort to rewrite history, mostly because the Nazi-curious hoseheads who work in it think official histories have been entirely too unfair to white people. But his point about how ridiculous it is to cut a program that cost all of $300,000 out of a $6 trillion budget is inarguable. And that number does not quantify the amount of interest in history for kids that also gets slashed when they can’t participate in events like this, because such a number is unquantifiable.

But hey, maybe all those kids will forget the humanities and go into the lucrative field of sewing sneakers together in all the sneaker-making factories that are going to bloom across our fair land once Trump and his gang of galactic dipshits finish destroying foreign trade and get all the sneaker-sewing factories chugging to life across our great land.

Meanwhile, DOGE is reduced to bragging on eXitter about minor user interface changes to government websites

That is, admittedly, a weird place to have had a log-in button. It has been a long time since yr Wonkette left behind a career working in technology. But we do know enough to understand that any change to a UI interface is going to go through some pretty widespread testing across various platforms. And this is done in a testing environment, not the live one. And you are going to especially want to thoroughly test the change for such a large public-facing site like that of the IRS, especially during freaking tax season, which is the absolute worst time to risk breaking anything.

In short, while three months to make this change is probably a little absurd, it is understandable why the technology team at the IRS would be very cautious. It is also absurd to roll in even a minor change in 71 minutes without fairly rigorous testing.

But it is especially absurd to do it in the context of bragging about the incredible changes you are making to government efficiency. Oooo, you moved one link on one out of probably hundreds of thousands of pages spread across who knows how many government-run websites? Congrats, you have saved America’s fiscal future.

No, the only way to slash $2 trillion out of the budget is to go after entitlements directly instead of simply making accessing programs like Social Security an enormous pain in the ass. On Thursday, Republicans took yet one more step in that direction when the House of Representatives approved a budget resolution that will eventually require gutting Medicaid like Melanie Lynskey gutting a rabbit in her garden in “Yellowjackets.”

Senate Republicans Reinvent Math So They Can Make America Super Poor

This was the resolution, sort of and no pun intended, of a standoff between the Senate and the House. The latter had passed a budget resolution that absolutely gashed entitlements. The former passed a budget resolution that, with the help of funny math, did not gash them quite as badly. This led to a standoff in which the hard Right in the GOP caucus refused to sign onto the Senate’s resolution unless the Senate pinky-swore that the final reconciliation package would cut $1.45 trillion in spending over the next decade. Which, again, is going to require steep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Maybe the Republicans think the DOGE cuts have given them a much larger head start? Possibly. Or possibly they are past caring. That’s the trouble with being both sociopaths and morons. It makes it much harder to determine which is more motivating, sociopathy or stupidity. Let’s just go with “both.”

[Business Insider / WSJ / eXitter / WaPo]

You can support Wonkette for about .000000000000000000000001% of DOGE’s cuts, but the difference is that your support might make Elon Musk mad.