Columnist tears into GOP's 'shower thought' plan for massive federal spending slash
President-elect Donald Trump intends to empower two loyalists to cut out large swaths of federal government expenditure, but a new analysis finds their plans are sorely lacking.
Washington Post columnist Philip Bump on Monday tore apart Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's claims that they can cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal deficit as heads of a Department of Government Efficiency.
"There’s long been a perception that government spending is mostly on things like overpriced ashtrays (thank you, Al Gore) or handouts to people who are exploiting the system," Bump wrote.
"That’s never been true — and it is increasingly less true as America’s ballooning population of senior citizens (thank you, baby boomers) means more spending on programs focused on the elderly. Cutting federal education spending means some people would lose their jobs and far more students would have to scramble to replace programs and support the federal government provides."
"But the human toll of such cuts doesn’t appear to occur to the unelected allies whom Trump has empowered to suggest them," the columnist added.
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Ramaswamy has suggested firing any federal employee whose Social Security number ends in an odd number — which he said would result in an immediate 50 percent reduction — and then cutting any remaining employees whose Social Security number starts in an even number, which Bump said was ludicrous and unworkable.
"To demonstrate the extent to which Ramaswamy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, just consider that last part, about axing half of the half of the remaining federal workforce by picking out the first digit of their Social Security numbers," Bump wrote, pointing out that the first digits in a Social Security number correlate to the region where the number was issued.
"Since federal employees are not evenly distributed around the country, Ramaswamy’s shower-thoughts plan would not evenly reduce the number of federal workers."
Ramaswamy says his cuts would eventually reduce the number of federal workers by about 75 percent, but Bump said that would send shockwaves through the government and the economy.
"Let's step back for a moment and note that even Ramaswamy's ideally random 75 percent reduction in federal employment would not be a shrug-it-off shift," Bump wrote. "It's not like you'd go to the local permitting office and the four people sitting around drinking coffee would not be one person feverishly trying to meet demand."
"It would mean 2.2 million people put out of work, including 219,000 in the seven swing states that were the focus of the 2024 election," he added. "It includes 167,000 U.S. government employees in Texas and Florida, more than the number of people who lost their jobs in October nationally."