Can Elon Musk Cut Two Trillion Dollars From the US Budget?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up Donald Trump's newly created Department of Government Efficiency which plans to take aim at wasteful government spending. On the campaign Elon Musk claimed that he could cut two trillion dollars in government spending. What would those cuts look like and how likely is Elon Musk to succeed? Does Elon Musk have too many conflicts of interest to do this job?

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[JenDinnXuz-xm]

In Australia, our government drastically reduced the public sector and instead spent the money on large consultants who not only did a poor job, but also leaked new tax legislation so that their customers could restructure to avoid taxes and took billions of dollars while delivering nothing. As a result, the private sector has the potential to be as wasteful.

[porkypine]

surely there will be zero conflict of interest between the richest man in the world with direct government contracts while leading budget oversight for the government

[NimbleBard]

Elon Musk: "It will be financially hard for you, people, but it's a risk I am willing to take."

[seriousmfr]

This is pretty unsettling, as someone who relies pretty heavily on my disability im utterly horrified

[theyruinedyoutubeagain]

OK, Patrick casually having a $6M artwork behind him is a great flex

[TheGIGACapitalist]

Reminder that Americans pay over twice as much in public spending alone on healthcare than any other country per capita and private costs exceed even that.

[betube]

I work for a contractor working for the government. I'm giving my opinion not that of the gov or my employer. The most wasteful things I observe are usually measures to keep the government from wasting money. You must spend months justifying a project that anyone involved knows from experience is a good idea. You must make plans a year out because that is how the funding cycle works. Making those plans chews up hundreds of thousands of dollars and the plans need to be either ridiculously vague or cover absurd possibilities to attempt to predict the future. Then, despite your best efforts, unknown unknowns pop up 3 months in and set you back a month or two. And whenever someone wants to make things "more efficient" they ask for lots of reports giving even more justification and you spend months writing those reports rather than doing the thing they are supposedly paying you for. But they never count the waste of all these extra reports and figures and the political maneuvering people do to try to make themselves look better in the reports and the calcifying changes that get put in place to shield people's jobs from "cost cutting."
Trust is valuable because it enables efficiency. These mistrustful campaigns waste that precious resource and also increase inefficiency.

[jamesgravil]

"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."

[JohnSmith-xyh]

Getting the Pentagon to pass an audit would be a good start.

[jameshughes]

I don't think left leaning americans would claim that this level is spending is 'fine'. I think the disagreement would be in what the government spends money on, and certainly about whether or not privatization actually saves money.

[marianhunt]

Corporation inefficiency is also huge. No-one ever speaks about this. Land fill is filled with corporations excess. Perfectly good food and all manner of goods thrown into landfill just to keep prices high and protect brands. Meanwhile people, yes our fellow humans, dying from hunger and neglect.

[JohnSmall]

In the UK we've had over 40 years of the trickle down fairy waving the 'efficiency' wand and now sfa works.

We can't even get rubbish collected on time. It's impossible to get a doctors appointment in good time, hospital waiting lists are through the roof, roads are potholed, trains are the most expensive and least reliable in Europe, School buildings are crumbling, hospital buildings are crumbling, care homes have been sold off to hedge funds who extract maximum profit, courts are so backlogged the justice system has effectively stopped working, prisons are filled to overcrowding and they have to release criminals early. Councils are going bankrupt. University students are mired in debt for most of their working lives. Universities are about to go bust. Housing is low quality and expensive, so that most young people will never own their own homes. Pensions are meagre. Crime is rife. Especially high value corruption, which is never prosecuted.

Yet somehow very rich people have become even richer living on government contracts which got shovelled in their direction in return for donations and quasi legal forms of corruption such as the promise of directorships and sinecures

In contrast, places like Sweden, Norway, Finland, have high taxes, high government expenditure, and stuff works, Roads are clean, few potholes, public buildings are well maintained, public transport is affordable and reliable, it's easy to get a doctors appointment, hospital waiting lists are very short, University education is nearly free. Housing is high quality and cheap (relative to the UK). Pensions are generous. Crime rates are low.

The US economy has very low productivity if you measure productivity in terms of outcomes for ordinary people. Ordinary Americans have a very low quality of life compared with ordinary Europeans. All that 'wealth creating' has resulted in a low quality of life for ordinary Americans. But mega riches for a tiny number of billionaires.

[jasontang]

Didn't realise you are wealthy enough to afford $6M artwork on a rap news budget. Congrats on your success.

[jedics]

Give a billionaire the job of "cleaning up regulation" when his own interests directly benefit, no wonder he was literally jumping for joy in support of Trump.
Instead of protest, they cheer for him to get richer by the simpletons who think the trickle down effect is still coming. The only thing trickling down to anybody will be austerity.

[CanalTremocos]

If the Pentagon passes one audit in the next 4 years I'll buy a Tesla.

[DarkRoomAmbience]

If he starts with all the government subsidies that have kept all his businesses afloat for decades, maybe we can get to that $2T

[Kaosi]

I'm still not over the "department" of efficiency having... two directors

[xela]

So a small challenge at the beginning at 3:30

From 1200-1600 we had a completely different conception of how states should be funded and who was the sovereign. It was pretty much exclusively monarchies for bigger states, and those were often funded by private ventures of the kings. Like for example royal farms and such. So of course they don't need as much taxes (and really, they only taxed the nobility a little and worked a lot with tariffs, which by themselves also have harmful effects on the economy). So comparing this time span to modernity compares two different concepts of statehood, sovereignity, as well as the size of those states (in the economic sense).

This is not even a thing about left vs. right, this is about the basis underlying everything.

[johnpienta]

This is a reminder that in America you have long wait times in healthcare, service deserts and monopoly pricing. That means you'll sit and wait 6 hours in the ER just like Canada, except you will get a $6, 000 bill, our leading cause of personal bankruptcy is medical debt, and 1/5 women with stage 4 breast cancer have bills in collections.

We pay extra so insurance companies, PBMs, drug companies, device manufacturers, hospital systems can have record profits. Hospitals/doctors are not allowed to charge patients a lower price than the insurance companies get charged, yet insurance companies negotiate to reimburse pennies on the dollar for that same charge.

It's cheating in every direction. I'll be shocked if this administration makes anything better for anyone except themselves.

[shep]

“Hedge fund manager tells you why deregulation is good”