Last month, America turned 250 years old — a cause for celebration of a country founded on an idea of equality that we strive to make better for future generations.
This week, America will reach $40 trillion in debt — a cause for alarm for the country’s financial stability that threatens those future generations.
Led by the world’s richest man and saddled with young inexperienced and uninformed devotees, DOGE executed late-night raids at government agencies that resulted in mass firings, resignations and chaos.
President Donald Trump did not comment Thursday on this milestone of profligate government spending. Instead, he exhibited his new White House helipad and driveway and bragged about the building’s under-construction ballroom. The president claims the helipad will be privately funded, but The Washington Post reports that it, the ballroom and other White House construction projects will cost at least $900 million, “covered primarily by taxpayers.”
Trump’s attitude toward the ballooning debt is entirely in keeping with his first move after returning to the White House: giving unprecedented power to an unelected Elon Musk and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. Musk initially claimed his DOGE staffers would root out government waste and ultimately save $2 trillion. Needless to say, they did not.
Led by the world’s richest man and saddled with young inexperienced and uninformed devotees, DOGE executed late-night raids at government agencies that resulted in mass firings, resignations and chaos. They shuttered programs and agencies and became the messy, unaccountable bureaucracy that Musk had promised to decimate. Exacerbating this, Congress seemed to take DOGE’s existence as permission to abdicate its own job of deciding, approving and directing government funding.
Musk and DOGE held the highest level of contempt for USAID and lifesaving programs like PEPFAR, the wildly successful and popular program initiated under George W. Bush that has saved more than 26 million lives from HIV/AIDS, mainly in Africa. To date, the tiny UNAIDS program, whose work includes data-driven coordination and oversight to ensure global health efficiency, still lacks its congressionally appropriated funding.
Today, $40 trillion of debt, minus DOGE cuts, still equals $40 trillion in debt. Those that still believe DOGE saved the government money do not understand either government or math. Perhaps both. The debt is no better because of DOGE, your life is no better because of DOGE, but millions are worse off because of DOGE. Lives were destroyed, from domestic American government employees to the poorest of the poor around the world whose only hope came from five letters: USAID.
Fraud in government spending happens. It is real. It should be investigated. But only a fool thinks we can balance the budget or address the debt by fraud alone.
As the national debt crossed the $40 trillion mark, it is important to recognize it wasn’t always this way. In the year 2000, the debt was around $5.6 trillion. President Bill Clinton not only balanced the government’s books, but he also had a budget surplus amid a roaring economy. Clinton wanted to use the newfound savings to pay down the debt while Republicans favored returning money to taxpayers. Today, both parties have engaged in insane levels of deficit spending, which arguably have fueled inflation and exacerbated inequality in American society and now across generations.
Since then, we have added about $35 trillion to the debt, thanks to everything from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to post-9/11 wars, economic recoveries and pandemic emergencies. Revenues have come nowhere close to meeting annual budget deficits.
The cruel joke of DOGE may be over but the claims of fraud only grow louder and sometimes even more absurd. To be clear, fraud in government spending happens. It is real. It should be investigated. But only a fool thinks we can balance the budget or address the debt by fraud alone.
A $40 trillion national debt has real implications for our country and the future of every citizen. The true fraudsters, from DOGE and its enablers on, are those who lie to the public, shift blame and scapegoat the vulnerable while they continue spending our nation over a cliff.
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