March 20, 2025

By Jim Towey

During the first two months of his new term in the White House, President Trump has expended a great deal of black ink signing executive orders to eliminate some of the red ink in the federal budget. His newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under the direction of Elon Musk, has wacked away at various low-hanging fruits in numerous Washington agencies where billions of tax dollars were squandered. He and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon – she of WWF professional wrestling fame – have the department’s finances in a submission hold, with educators, employees, and teacher unions crying foul.

For its efforts, the DOGE website boasts $105 billion in savings, promising more to come. Musk claims a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions” accounts for these spending reductions.

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of cutting some of these programs or the methods he and his team utilized. Regardless, wrestling fans love their stars, and Musk and McMahon make for a great tag-team. Most Americans seem to be cheering their efforts as the cuts keep coming, with even the fat cats of academia now in DOGE’s crosshairs. This all makes for captivating, if not entertaining, media coverage.

Big ticket items

But during Trump’s first 60 days, no attention whatsoever has been paid to the Main Event, the big ticket items of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the heavyweight entitlement programs that drive America’s annual budget deficit and massive $36.2 trillion debt. Last year the federal government devoted $1.9 billion to health care programs and services, or 27% of federal outlays, and an additional $1.5 billion on Social Security benefits, amounting to 21% of the budget. So, we are talking about roughly half of the federal budget.

When you exempt the great majority of defense spending from the budget axe and are stuck with having to pay the interest payments on the national debt (at halftime of the fiscal year, we are at about $400 billion), Musk ends up, to borrow a phrase from Jesus, “straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel.”

Sure, $100 billion in savings is still real money, but in comparison to the cause of the federal budgets hemorrhaging red ink – entitlement spending – it is rather puny. DOGE’s gleaning efforts in the fields of discretionary spending will only yield so much fruit as it is not even 15% of annual government expenditures. It might make for great media to parade bogus US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs peddling abroad the Biden administration’s obsession with gender ideology, or the billions that were rushed out the door at the Department of Energy that the Wall Street Journal rightly decried in an editorial today; but this is time spent swatting gnats while the camel in the tent wreaks havoc.

Existential threats

And by havoc, I mean the existential threats facing Social Security and Medicare. Both programs face serious challenges, with the former technically insolvent by 2033. That may seem like a long time from now to some, but tell that to the Baby Boomer seniors who need Social Security and Medicare.

Enter Mehmet Oz, the newly appointed, but not yet Senate-confirmed, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Reaction to his appointment was met with “meh” in some quarters and celebrated in others. The TV celebrity and former professor of surgery at Columbia University will need to break out his scalpel if the Trump Administration is serious about finding savings in amounts material enough to matter. Trump wants to fund the extension of the tax cuts he engineered in his first term. He won’t find the money on USAID’s cutting room floor. He will have to look at entitlements.

I respect that at a recent Senate hearing, Oz refused to rule out Medicaid cuts. Good for him, and shame on the showboating senators like Ron Wyden who fiddle while Medicare and Medicaid (and Tesla cars) burn. The latest temperature taking of Social Security and Medicare’s health will be released by the Social Security Trust Funds this spring and my guess is things have gotten worse from the tepid report that Janet Yellen issued in the middle of her boss’ re-election campaign last year.

Maybe Dr. Oz can begin a national discussion on entitlement reform where the big bucks are. Without a serious, concerted effort to reign in these costs, the bloated federal budget will continue down the Yellow Brick Road toward obesity – something Dr. Oz’s boss, Robert Kennedy, Jr., abhors in toto. The curtain needs to be pulled back on Social Security and Medicare so that America’s seniors know what they can expect in the not-too-distant future.

Brace yourselves for the trustee’s report.

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)