Unpopular because it's so flagrantly ignorant. How much do you know about the "egregious" expenditures by rank-and-file federal employees just doing their jobs?
Maybe it is, but also maybe it's actually really expensive to run a country as big as the United States, and maybe people offering simple truisms and simple solutions to complicated problems are just full of shit.
$2 trillion is all of the discretionary spending including defense. Are you saying the whole federal government except for entitlements should be eliminated?
Anyone who worries about spending without talking about taxes is not serious or being deceptive. The cause of the current deficit is mostly Trump tax cuts. Plus all of the temporary spending to get out of the pandemic recession. The solution is to remove the Trump tax cuts.
USA government spending as a percent of GDP is on the lower side of developed nations (high 30s depending on the source). Our peers are Luxembourg and Norway, and we’re well below France and Germany. Granted that we are one of the few developed nations that don’t provide universal healthcare which biases us lower.
While I’d share your concerns about fiscal sustainability, we’re an outlier on tax receipts not spending.
I think the worrying part is the debt/GDP ratio where the US is among the top 10. Also there's a high amount of private/household debt.
I'm not from the US but I'm worried. The economic signs are worrying and a US that is overloaded with debt has been historically devastating for the global economy.
All the political uncertainty and questionable economic policies don't help that either.
It's unpopular because it's incorrect. This isn't fiscal "restraint", this is a spanner thrown into the federal government with the intention to cause dysfunction. When the government is no longer able to meet the needs of the people because it has been intentionally kneecapped, the billionaires who made this choice will push to privatize the affected services instead.
And in doing so, they will take the value and experience that was built up in our federal institutions over generations and throw it away to enrich themselves.
> The list of absurd spending makes me super angry; I never voted for climate change grants for Sri Lanka, or funding operas in Columbia or research in to Vietnamese bathhouses, or supplying birth control to the Taliban
I suggest you save your anger for real problems you actually understand. It will save you a lot of stress.
All of the “absurd” spending DOGE cites may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a tiny amount in comparison to the overall budget, and remarkably skewed toward specific, hot button issues like climate change, DEI, etc. Where are the cuts to the $852B military budget, which has been shown for decades as being insanely wasteful? Why isn’t DOGE investigating ways to cut down our $952B in interest payments due in 2025?
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the military to prepare plans to make drastic budget cuts over the next five years, with an exception for border security, according to a new memo obtained by CNN.
The memo, dated Tuesday, calls for military leaders to provide a proposal for eight percent in budget cuts each year for the next five years."
