Trump may have stopped the left-wing revolution, but his achievements as a top manager in the top position remain miserable: the US is running a record deficit and DOGE is ceasing to exist.
The first year of Donald Trump’s second term will soon be over. In January, the public watched with interest as the new president made statements about restoring national finances. Elon Musk and his DOGE were supposed to reduce waste, fraud and bureaucracy and optimize the government’s work. New IT systems were to be introduced, useless jobs abolished, and unnecessary expenses reduced. Musk ran across the stage with a chainsaw accompanied by Javier Milea (the Argentine president), and Trump said that DOGE was a revolution and that they would find hundreds of billions in savings and reduce bureaucracy, including the federal administration. In short: America will be great again!
However, reality proved cruel. October marks the start of a new financial year in the US and thus a new budget. The budget deficit reached a record high of $284.3 billion this month, which is $300 million more than during the Covid-19 crisis, a time when the entire economy was shut down and the world was turned upside down. Never before in US history has there been such a high budget deficit at the start of the financial year.
However, it is important to note that an increasing proportion of this is attributable to the rising cost of servicing the debt. At present, it already accounts for 19% of all revenue, and forecasts indicate that expenditure on servicing US debt will exceed all social programmes and transfers within 10 years. Therefore, it can be argued that DOGE attempted to clean one room without realizing that the entire house is dirty and the owner is constantly walking around in dirty shoes. The savings should have amounted to more than $200 billion, while audits showed that this could be four times as much. This means that not only did loud statements come to little, but in the end there was still a record budget deficit. Ultimately, DOGE ceased to exist after 11 months, even though it was supposed to function until mid-2026.
Hopefully Mr Trump manages world affairs better on the military front than he does on the economic front in his own backyard, otherwise…
