🏛️ DOGE delivers real federal spending cuts under unified Republican control

“I think that on Doge, there's clearly a strong desire of many in the Republican Party, and Elon, and the people that Elon brought with him for major government reform. Much more efficiency, much less spending. I think that we have to get as much of that past as possible in the first, certainly in the first year.”

“by the way, we introduced a long time ago this idea of zero-based budgeting into the lexicon and language of these political candidates that they used all the way through to the finish line. I do believe the Republicans earnestly mean it.”

“I'm saying this is going to bring in the most disruptive force that federal agencies have ever seen. And the intention with Trump isn't to find some person to keep running things the way they have been run in the past. His mandate from the people who elected him based on the message he put out there is to do the opposite, which is to go in and be as disruptive and damaging and destructive as possible.”

“Vivek put out a very compelling post on X where he basically said, like, look, when you, on the one hand, there's going to be radical transparency, but on the other hand, there's a lot of case law that we can use to kind of try to really dismantle the government apparatus and they're putting themselves on a shot clock to do it by 2026 for the 250th anniversary. So I think I'm really predisposed to this idea that it'll force the government to be very resilient at the end of this process, and I think that's a good thing.”

“I would also just say that with respect to the other picks, there's obviously a lot of hysteria going on, a lot of hyperbole about the downsides. I don't think it's going to be like a meteor hitting the earth. I don't think it's that destructive. I think that it's more like, will some eggs be broken up to make an omelette, right?”

“This was a multi-hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets.”

“I think we're seeing some early indication of what DOGE will be able to do.”

“Root for them and root for this process, please, because this is a path to fixing the most acute existential problem we have, which is our debt.”

“So I don't know if it cracks with DOGE. I really don't know if people step up and recognize the limits of government and what the limits should be of the federal government on an electorate basis.”

“I feel like Doge and cost cutting is going to be a lot harder to realize than folks assume. Nearly everyone I met with who works in government or is entering government had this, if not disdain for Doge, a concern that it doesn't really align interests with the political objectives of politicians, that they need to get more stuff for their constituents in order to get re-elected and that they're not going to vote programs away.”

“what they say is that folks that actually allocate the internal spending in the United States gets a lot more scrutiny because there's all of this horse trading because they want some of this money to get allocated into their specific area. It is going to be a very complicated thing.”

“So the Overton window is wide open now to discuss even the budget of the VA and where is the money going to come from? So, I think we're actually going to make progress on it. This was like a sacred cow and now we're talking about it.”

“I will tell you once again, after our visit in DC last week, there was not a single member of Congress that I spoke with who views cutting to be a mandate for them in the laws that they're trying to pass. They all have a very different kind of agenda than DOGE.”

“If it was really hard to hire people and they could even make it harder to hire people, do they fight bureaucracy with bureaucracy that it's harder to spend, harder to hire people, harder to procure certain things that you're supposed to spend money on? You can reduce this spend through a lot of very interesting nuanced rules that they're in control of.”

“This is the naming and shaming of government waste that's actually going to work. And the DOGE account on Twitter is doing it. They're basically saying, hey, we're giving foreign aid for this project, for that project.”

“I think it's kind of 10% of the budget is probably fraud. I think it might be low, actually. So you're talking about $650 billion, a trillion in waste. I think that's probably about right. That alone fixes the problem.”

“Because I think what we're finding early days is the rot is super pervasive. There's no accountability. And so I think you need people to look at it with fresh eyes.”

“Yeah, this is the eggplant emoji. It's what we needed. If you zoom out on what DOGE is doing, I think the best way to describe it is zero-based budgeting.”

“Let me up level this for a second. Okay, so we knew the US government runs a $2 trillion deficit every year. We're in debt, almost $40 trillion. And we also knew that anytime anyone tries to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder. Okay, so the question is just why? Well, now we know. The money is all going to them.”

“Now we see what happens when somebody picks up the issue of stop wasting money. It is a popular issue. This is only going to make Trump more popular.”

“We're talking about close to $300 billion in savings over five years if they hit, which isn't a crazy target, 8% a year.”

“as far as I can tell, the cuts proposed over the next couple of years for the Defense Department are of approximately the same magnitude as the reduction in the defense budget that occurred between 2010 and today. And so it's not like this is some unprecedented transformation in DOD budget.”

“No, I think he is the mechanism of implementing the austerity. I think people want this austerity. Just the question is, what happens when the actual byproducts of that austerity are felt by people for six or seven years? I don't know what the answer is.”

“Meanwhile, you've got Elon and Trump saying, hey, we're cutting, we're cutting, we're saving, we're going to get to a trillion dollars a year. But that's not showing up necessarily in the budget. Is it showing up in the actions out of Doge, TBD?”

“The direct employees of federal agencies is a fraction of people that are employed indirectly by government spending. This is super important. Because as we all know, many government agencies write checks to large contractors, subcontractors, and third party service providers that do the work for them.”

“If it was equal to what Elon was doing, it'd be at least five trillion dollars. And I push a bunch of them. They say, Oh, the Congressional Budget Office and all these things. I'm sure there's some tough things there. But like, this is crazy. We need to see what these cuts need to be on Doge. And we need to cut five trillion. And none of these people have the balls to do that. It's not the political will to do it, is my interpretation.”

“We've never been in a situation where in a hundred days, a federal government is setting out to cut their spending by a trillion dollars, which has a significant effect, a recessionary effect on the economy, because there's less federal dollars flowing out, which goes as revenue into various businesses and income for a lot of people that are employed as contractors or directly by federal government agencies”

“When we were there, we heard about one consulting firm, 95 plus of all of their revenue, multi-billion dollar revenue comes from Time and Materials contracts with the United States government. We heard throughout the week, I've reposted it on X, $65 billion is paid out to consulting organizations beyond just that one in these Time and Materials cost plus contracts.”

“I would say Doge's efforts are important. If you can really cut a trillion dollars of kind of waste, fraud and abuse out of the government spending, that's good.”

“And while I love what DOGE is doing, the systemic drivers of our national debt are not actually being touched at this point by DOGE. I mean, it's the means-tested welfare programs that are really the systemic long-term drivers of our national debt.”

“So as Doge sort of slows down that money flow, and as the consensus in Congress gets to a better budget, I think that you're going to see that the government was probably responsible for 100 to 150 basis points of just waste. And if you take that out, you will technically be in a recession.”

“my belief is that the revenue loss from the dose's destruction of significant part of the functioning of our nation's tax collection system is likely to exceed in terms of contributing more to the deficit than any savings that is successfully realized.”

“I am not going to tell you that there are zero Doge cuts that made sense. But I am going to say that what I see them doing overall is highly destructive state capacity”

“I give the administration, like I give Doge an A++. It's obvious like they're doing the right thing. I give the communication like a B, like just increase the communication and you can see they're doing that.”

“What Elon is trying to do, we have a two trillion dollar annual deficit. He's trying to figure out how to cut it.”

“my biggest concern is not something that Doge is going to do or not. It's not up to Doge to do that. It's up to, frankly, these old bulls in Congress who control the appropriations process. Are they going to basically backslide and just put the spending back in?”

“Polymarket showing an 84% chance of less than $50 billion being cut in 2025”

“So I think for the first time in decades, we've actually started to make real cuts in government, real cuts in the federal workforce. And look, we'd like to do more, but that is a huge shift in the conversation.”

“And I've said this from day one that DOJ can only do so much. And clearly that's the case where they're now talking about sub $300 billion a year in potential annual savings from DOJ action. At the end of the day, Congress needs to take action.”

“This thing is like anti-DOGE. If DOGE was meant to be a reflection of the American voting population's desire for meaningful reform in government, cost controls, some form of austerity, and to get this debt spiral in check, this is the opposite of that.”

“I mean, do I wish that it made all the DOGE cuts permanent through rescissions? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's outrageous that there are enough House Republicans who didn't want to back up DOGE that wasn't enacted.”

“I think the writings on the wall that the system is winning and the rebels came in and they tried to fix the inefficiencies in government with DOGE under Elon's leadership and our friend Antonio's participation and a great group of individuals who are true patriots who are spending time trying to help reassess how the government operates.”

“He was elected to balance his budget and to have austerity. He's going to put more onto the debt, and we sat here on this very podcast, the four of us, and said this was the most important issue on the world, and Trump is putting gasoline on the fire.”

“So if the CEO of the United States, President Trump, isn't allowed to fire people, then all of that stuff just compounds. So I think that this is a really important thing that just happened. It allows us to now level set how big should the government be.”

“Except that ruling doesn't happen without Doge. That Doge caused that ruling to occur.”

“Like this EO is only approved to allow for the planning. I think the vote might be closer. I think there's still a majority on the Supreme Court for the actual implementation, but it may not be 8-1 when there's a specific plan that has to navigate its way through the courts again.”

“So the focus is going to be to continue to find opportunities to basically legislate what has been found in DOJ, the other activities well beyond DOJ. Every department head, every agency is looking for ways to streamline regulations and to cut the cost and to operate more efficiently. I've got to believe there are tremendous opportunities there and many billions more dollars that will come out of the budget as a result.”