DOGE is not radical enough America is facing financial ruin

The Rafah Riviera. The withdrawal from Ukraine. The Republican proposal, apparently serious, to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland”. In foreign policy alone, the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term have been bewildering: radical, revolutionary even, smashing decades of settled policy at a stroke. Yet listen to observers across the political spectrum, and all this pales compared to what’s happening inside America’s borders.

To supporters and detractors alike, the Department of Government Efficiency promises to remake the republic. Already, the media is stuffed with lurid stories of teenagers accessing the US Treasury Department’s archaic payment systems, even as swathes of the bureaucracy have already been defunded. Given USAID alone boasted an annual budget of $40 billion, it’s clear change is coming, and that’s before Elon Musk’s outfit gets to the $500 billion of government spending supposedly “unauthorised” by Congress.

Yet if the Right heralds the demise of the pen-pushers, and their liberal opponents fear the rise of an American Caesar, the truth is far less impressive. Whatever the sluggishness of DC’s civil servants, DOGE barely scratches the surface of government spending. And besides, worrying about waste, let alone fantasy projects abroad, ignores the real problem — that US democracy is fundamentally broken, that Congress is incompetent, and that none of the country’s basic challenges, from immigration to jobs, can be solved by its exhausted class of ancien régime failures.

In basic terms, DOGE is Trump’s attempt to assert wider control over the way the government handles its finances. This flies in the face of well-established American norms. The US Constitution clearly states that the federal government is supposed to operate on a division of powers: appropriating money is meant to be the prerogative of the legislature in the form of Congress. It is Congress that decides what the government will spend money on, how much money to spend, and when to spend it. The role of the president is simply to handle implementation.

Trump and Musk argue that the discretion the president has in implementing the decisions by Congress should include the right to defund government agencies — if, that is, the president deems they’re not doing their job properly. Certainly, that’s the argument Trump’s lawyers are busy making, even as their claims wobble between acceptable political manoeuvring and an unconstitutional power grab. Just a few weeks in, Trump and DOGE are unsurprisingly drowning in court challenges, injunctions, and other legal headaches. An increasing number of Trump’s supporters are getting impatient, clamouring for the day when he simply tells the judges to take a hike. As Andrew Jackson once said of a Supreme Court justice: “Marshall has made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it.”

At the surface, this feels like a very serious drama. The world’s richest man, an erratic and unaccountable billionaire, has been set loose on the federal government — boasting undefined powers to wreck the republic. The reality, though, is rather more mundane. To understand this, you must appreciate the scale of DOGE’s sweep. Yes, it’s easy to mock USAID for schemes such as the $70,000 spent on a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Yet when placed next to the full size of the national budget, Musk is conducting the administrative equivalent of scrambling about for change behind the sofa.

After all, the government today runs a deficit close to $2 trillion a year. To fund this deficit, it borrows roughly $10 billion each and every day. It’s important to realise here that while most countries do have some kind of national debt, the size and trajectory of America’s deficit is different. In 2000, the national debt was some $5.7 trillion dollars. In 2017, when Trump first took office, it was $20 trillion. Now, it’s over $36 trillion, putting unsustainable pressure on defence and social welfare costs. Even the most generous accounting of what Musk and Trump have achieved so far boils down to a few hours of US debt. And that’s if they can defend it all in court, and make it stick — and there’s no guarantee of that.

DOGE, in short, is a gimmick. Any meaningful control of US government spending can’t be attained through bureaucratic jiu-jitsu or legal trickery. To really cut the deficit, Trump would either have to literally crown himself king and abolish the Constitution, or else go to Congress and get them to actually do the job the Founding Fathers gave them. But Trump can’t do either of these things. If he simply ruled by decree, a polarised nation would explode into civil war. Yet, as bleak as that sounds, it might actually be more realistic than having Congress appropriate the funds. The legislature can nowadays barely pass the stop-gap, temporary funding measures it uses in lieu of actual budgets to prevent government shutdowns. The last time Congress passed all its required bills on time was in 1996, and over the last 40 years it has only managed to complete the appropriations process a grand total of four times.

Where, then, does that leave the president? In a word, trapped: in a political system collapsing round his ears. To take one practical example, consider the so-called “mass deportations” Trump promised pre-election, with his supporters hoping that once he assumed office, decades of illegal immigration could be upended in an orgy of raids and detentions. To a lot of Trump’s followers, deportation almost seemed like a matter of willpower: as long as you simply wanted it hard enough, anything could be done.

Yet once Trump was finally sworn in, nothing much happened. The administration initially promised to publish the daily number of arrests and deportations. Soon enough, though, people realised that Trump wasn’t doing a much better job than Joe Biden, let alone Barack Obama. The administration’s deportations are hitting a “wall” as the limitations of funding, facility space, and personnel become ever more acute. But the hype must go on: The Guardian even discovered the White House was gaming Google search results to create the illusion of activity, with old press releases given 2025 timestamps.

Eventually, the administration simply stopped talking about mass deportations. The stories that now do come out are mostly bad, and Trumpworld is back to doing what the President himself attacked Biden for: letting arrested illegal immigrants go free because of a lack of detention capacity. That gets to the heart of the problem. Building a detention centre is less an act of will, and more about planning and resourcing. But the US government simply does not have the capacity to fulfil these dreams of “mass deportations” in the medium term. That would require additional officers and cells and aircraft, none of which the country ultimately has.

There are other examples here, too, from the Mexico border wall to reshoring jobs. All these projects require the legislature to cooperate, to pass laws and appropriate funds. But, again, it’s an open secret that what the Trump administration most dreads is having to abandon executive orders — which give the appearance of strength — and wrangle enough votes in the House and the Senate. When that happens, Trump’s mirage of strength will vanish.

In theory, of course, he could get Congress to find the cash to build his camps and finish the wall and bring the factories home. That, certainly, is what the legislature is there for. But, at this point, everyone knows Congress has become too broken to do the job, and its failures since 1996 are merely the start. First, consider the question of polarisation. With politicians ever more focused on painting their opponents as evil, actually working together has become near-impossible. Then there’s that ballooning deficit. At this point, the threat of Weimar-style hyperinflation, or else a government default, hangs over Congress like the Sword of Damocles, as an increasing share of the federal revenues are gobbled up by debt servicing. At the moment, over 25 cents on every dollar that the federal government makes goes towards paying interest on its debt, leaving precious little for other things.

Add to that a gaggle of special interests — healthcare, for one, uses lobbying and campaign financing to keep state spending high — and America’s ledger remains grimly in the red. Like cutting the deficit, of course, Trump could simply stage a coup, placing a crown on his head and declaring that the wall will be funded and the factories built. But, once more, that’s not actually possible: most of the state apparatus would refuse to go along, to say nothing of how ordinary citizens would react.

Combined with the hopelessness of Congress, Trump’s recent obsession with tariffs, like DOGE, must therefore be seen as a sign of weakness. At first blush, that seems counterintuitive: someone constantly threatening to destroy Canada’s economy seems like someone positively drunk with power. Well, given the Constitution, Trump can’t raise taxes or appropriate money directly — but what he can do is impose tariffs on Ottawa, as long as he fibs and pretends it’s for national security reasons. That is one of the few remaining ways to raise cash now left to the man who claims to be the most powerful on earth.

The US allies trying to parse Trump’s muddled messaging — “Is he angry about fentanyl? Does he want to annex us?” — are anyway overthinking things. America is broke, politics has frozen, and the system can’t function as the Founders envisaged. No less striking, paralysis is spreading through the whole government apparatus. By all accounts, the Republicans are having an extremely tough time crafting even a temporary spending bill that the party can agree on. A deal with Democrats, it goes without saying, is increasingly unimaginable.

All the while, the deficit is only rising. Even if Congress weren’t such a mess, a massive fiscal crisis is approaching, and Trump seems destined to be president when it arrives. This isn’t exclusively his fault, though he did very little to turn the ship around during his first term in the Oval. Rather, these crises are the result of decades of systemic mismanagement, with bickering politicians and special interests burrowed deep.

Even more worryingly, we’ve been here before. In 1788, France was also drowning in debt, and also had an executive desperate trying to correct the tailspin. No less striking, the Ancien Régime also had a legislature too broken to find solutions — but not so broken it couldn’t spend its time blocking attempts at reform. As for today, future historians won’t remember the squabbles around USAID: that just isn’t the story of our age. What matters instead is a financial system in ruins, a political class out of ideas, and the inevitability of a 1789 moment sooner or later.

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