Last month, America turned 250 years old — a cause for celebration of a country founded on an idea of equality that we strive to make better for future generations.
This week, America will reach $40 trillion in debt — a cause for alarm for the country’s financial stability that threatens those future generations.
Led by the world’s richest man and saddled with young inexperienced and uninformed devotees, DOGE executed late-night raids at government agencies that resulted in mass firings, resignations and chaos.
President Donald Trump did not comment Thursday on this milestone of profligate government spending. Instead, he exhibited his new White House helipad and driveway and bragged about the building’s under-construction ballroom. The president claims the helipad will be privately funded, but The Washington Post reports that it, the ballroom and other White House construction projects will cost at least $900 million, “covered primarily by taxpayers.”
Trump’s attitude toward the ballooning debt is entirely in keeping with his first move after returning to the White House: giving unprecedented power to an unelected Elon Musk and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. Musk initially claimed his DOGE staffers would root out government waste and ultimately save $2 trillion. Needless to say, they did not.
Led by the world’s richest man and saddled with young inexperienced and uninformed devotees, DOGE executed late-night raids at government agencies that resulted in mass firings, resignations and chaos. They shuttered programs and agencies and became the messy, unaccountable bureaucracy that Musk had promised to decimate. Exacerbating this, Congress seemed to take DOGE’s existence as permission to abdicate its own job of deciding, approving and directing government funding.
Musk and DOGE held the highest level of contempt for USAID and lifesaving programs like PEPFAR, the wildly successful and popular program initiated under George W. Bush that has saved more than 26 million lives from HIV/AIDS, mainly in Africa. To date, the tiny UNAIDS program, whose work includes data-driven coordination and oversight to ensure global health efficiency, still lacks its congressionally appropriated funding.
Matthew Bartlett
Matthew Bartlett is an MS NOW political analyst. He served as a Trump appointee at the State Department in the first administration.
