Proceeding beyond the laudable condemnation of “waste, fraud and abuse” in government programs, our president-elect and his cadre contend that the U. S. government needs to adhere to practices associated with businesses. They have to match expenses to income it is said.
They would have us adhere to Mr. Micawber’s adage in Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 and 6, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery.”
This misguided eruption is the product of the alleged business acumen of Donald Trump’s proposed appointees, chiefly Elon Musk, and of Trump himself. Trump’s wealth has long been the subject of debate, especially after his six bankruptcies. ( Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, tapped as Mideast adviser, was touted as a billionaire “dealmaker” when in fact he was selling trucks in Nigeria for a company that made a profit of less than $ 66,000 last year.)
Rich guys Vivek Ramaswamy and Musk are heading a non-governmental, self-annointed “Department” of Government Efficiency to cut two trillion dollars (more than the government’s total annual discretionary spending) from the government’s annual spending. Congress has not created such a “department” and spending cuts need its approval. Smoke and mirrors do not begin to describe the gyrations of the business efficiency gang and their juridically non-existent “department.” In partial acceptance of this hallucination, even some democrats are calling the “department’s” objectives “laudable.” Kool aid in the Capitol!
The purpose of government is to maintain social order; to provide public services; and to provide security and defense. Thus, the government is not a business. All three purposes of government are achieved through leadership and expenditures as appropriated by congress and approved by the president. Taxes, the fuel of these expenditures, finance only a part of them. The rest comes from debt.
In the recent Congressional explosions attending a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government through March 2025, the bipartisan agreement accepted by Speaker Johnson and vetoed by the president-elect provided money for the sick and the poor, including children fighting cancer. That’s part of what government does and is supposed to do in pursuit of the maintenance of social order and the provision of public services. Trump demanded that these expenditures be dropped from the CR and they were. Watch for more of this after January 20.
Construing government as a part of corporate America and the rush for profits is not a new idea. In the Eisenhower era, it was argued “what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.”
Not so. Savings should not include ripping the heart out of programs to help people in need. We cannot sell out to those who Franklin Roosevelt described as “entrenched greed.”