How To Cut $2 Trillion From The Budget
My humble thoughts on the topic
Lots of folks have lots of ideas. Here’s mine.
Return the Federal Government to its core purposes as outlined in the US Constitution. Stop having it be a nanny for all us citizens. If a nanny is needed, a state or local government should be doing that.
Here’s some ideas about what that means and looks like.
No more grants to NGO’s. No more tax breaks, subsidies, etc. No more Federal government funding state activities. Meaning that the Federal government will not allocate money to states for education, for example, or for road construction, or mass transit systems. If a state needs to do that, they can raise the revenue to do it and the citizens of that state can decide if it should be done, or not. This was a major aspect of the Founders being upset about taxation without representation.
The military. Let’s start by reducing the Flag Officer ranks of the military until you have the same ratio of Flag Officers to all other ranks as you had at the end of WW2. Then get rid of all the staff officers and NCO’s that supported that bloated Flag Officer corps. Or send them back to be shooters. If they don’t like that, they can retire. The primary purpose of the military is to fight wars, so get rid of all the stuff the military does that is something other than fighting wars. And start with all those people in the Pentagon that are not contributing to shooting our enemies in the face.
Stop agency mission creep. Sell all the arms and ammunition that all the agencies have stockpiled and use the funds from that to pay off federal debt. Eliminate all armed sworn LEO positions in the Federal government that are not part of the FBI, Secret Service, US Marshals, Coast Guard, or Department of Defense. If the IRS needs to arrest someone, they can get a warrant and have local cops or Marshals do the work.
More on agency mission creep. Make NASA an oversight and regulatory agency only and have all space flight and operations conducted by private companies. If the US government needs a space mission, they can pay SpaceX or Blue Origin for it. OR the DOD can conduct it for actual military operations.
in fact, no more quasi defense agencies outside the DOD. NASA, NRC, and so on. They need to be regulatory agencies and any operational mission should be transferred to the DOD, a state, an actual LE agency, or a private organization. No more operational agencies where there is no explicit Consitutional authority. HHS should not be administering health benefit programs. And so forth.
I have no idea how much money this would save. But it damn sure would get the US government much closer to its proper sphere of agency and authority. And probably save $2 Trillion a year without even breaking a sweat. If that money needs to be spent, the citizens of the individual states can decide to do it for their state. They know better, after all, what is needed in California than DC knows.
The Federal Government is not meant to do things for us. It is meant to provide the guard rails necessary to enable us to run our states, society, and economy ourselves.