Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, a one-time Democrat who is now a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, acknowledged that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) he's advising won't succeed in saving significant sums of money.
In an interview with the New York Times' Ross Douthat, Andreesen was challenged by the conservative columnist about DOGE's potential to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion a year.
In particular, Douthat points out that even if you fire what he describes as "dead wood" employees at federal agencies, you're "going to need to hire better people to replace those people" who will have to be paid appropriate salaries.
Added to this, so much federal money is spent on Social Security, Medicare, and other popular federal programs that it's hard to get real savings without touching those programs.
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This caused Andreesen to say that Douthat's arguments exhibit "total contempt for the taxpayer," which caused Douthat to push back.
"I wrote many, many columns in support of various versions of Paul Ryan's plan to cut Medicare or reform Medicare and reform Social Security," he said. "And the reason those plans went down to defeat was not that federal bureaucrats had contempt for the American taxpayer. It was that the American taxpayer, in election after election, likes and supports and votes in favor of Medicare and Social Security."
"They're not exposed to it," Andreesen insisted. "This is a big part of the bet. And look, maybe it'll work, and maybe it won't. But this is a big part of the bet, which is that the American taxpayer doesn't experience it that way because they don't actually have insight into it. Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program, like child disability in schools. It's far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what it was."
Andreesen went on to say that the program in question now consisted of allowing students in schools to "fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests."
