It has not escaped anyone’s attention that under the stewardship of Elon Musk the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has embarked on draconian cuts to US government spending.
So far, the cuts have included the closures of the American government’s aid program (USAID) and the Department of Education. Big cuts have also been proposed for health care, defence, the FBI, CIA, and many other departments and programmes.
Why, you may ask, is Trump gutting the US government?
There are two reasons and none of them have anything to do with efficiency.
First, the spending cuts are a pretext for Trump and Musk to lay off a huge number of independent civil servants. They will be replaced by sycophantic lackeys, who are ready to do anything Trump and Musk ask of them.
The layoffs are part of a much larger project of 'state capture' through which Trump and Musk hope to take outright control of public sector institutions and their resources. The ultimate aim is to accumulate as much power as possible and to steal a lot of money. For more on state capture, see here.
The second reason for the spending cuts is to pay for tax cuts for wealthy people. Or, more precisely, to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy. During his first term as president, Trump introduced huge tax cuts that were heavily skewed towards the wealthy. Households in the top 1 percentile received a tax cut of USD 60,000, while households in the bottom 60th percentile only received USD 500. The total Dollar value of the tax cut for top earners was three times larger than the combined Dollar value of the tax cut for people with incomes in the bottom 60th percentile (see here).
Trump’s 2017 tax cut was also wildly unsustainable, which prompted Congress, somewhat unusually, to introduce a sunset clause to the tax bill to make sure it would not bankrupt the US government; the tax cut for the rich will expire in 2025, that is, this year.
In other words, Trump is cutting spending, because he does not want his 2017 tax cut for the rich to expire. Instead, he is cutting spending for everyone else, including for the most vulnerable Americans, such as those on Medicaid.
All this is to say that next time you see a headline announcing a new big spending cut and layoffs in the US government please remember that you are witnessing a simple case of Trump and Musk taking from the poor in order to give to the rich. They are America's modern-day versions of Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham, respectively.
The big question is: where is Robin Hood?
The End
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