The Department of Government Efficiency has been much in the news since its creation was announced in mid-November by President-elect Donald Trump. Wealthy supporters Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chairmen of the advisory panel, are collecting ideas to right the nation’s finances.
Good ideas are needed. The federal government spends $6 trillion annually, runs a $2 trillion deficit, and has piled up $37 trillion in debt.
Musk has stated he wants to balance the budget. With tax increases off the table, that would necessitate $2 trillion in cuts. Though much needed, large reductions in spending will not be easy to achieve. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other “mandatory spending” forms cost nearly $4 trillion annually. Payments to investors for interest on the debt amount to about a trillion dollars, and national defense runs north of $800 million. To date, neither Trump, Musk, nor Ramaswamy have shown any interest in cutting these outlays.
That leaves them looking for savings in the discretionary portion of the budget, the $1.7 trillion in spending appropriated by Congress each year. Musk and Ramaswamy have pointed out that $500 billion of those dollars are “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”
The reader of that statement would be forgiven for imagining that unelected bureaucrats were reaching into the U.S. Treasury to spend money pell-mell. It is a bit more complicated than that, and Congress, not bureaucrats, are to blame.
Under the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act, Congress is supposed to pass two laws to spend money for any purpose. First, it should enact an authorization law to permit an agency to spend a certain amount of money on a particular purpose in a certain year. Subsequently, Congress should pass an appropriations statute that enables an agency to spend a specified amount of money equal to or less than the amount authorized.
Congress, for example, authorized the U.S. Fire Administration, which aids local fire departments through grants, to spend $77 million in 2023. However, it only appropriated $58 million that year.
Congress first started using a two-step approach in the mid-19th century, which legislators had good reasons for adopting. Not least, completing two steps makes it more difficult to spend money. Additionally, this method permits Congress to adjust spending to shifting circumstances. If the economy wobbles and tax revenues slide, it can spend less than it authorized. Government growth also might be curbed, legislators imagined, if programs’ ability to receive funds timed out. If Congress and the president could not agree to reauthorize a program, it would die. Requiring that programs and agencies be reauthorized offers regular opportunities to rethink and revise policies — a cornerstone of congressional oversight.
Unfortunately, Congress all too often allows authorizations of expenditures to expire and then appropriates money anyway. Earlier this year, the Congressional Budget Office identified 1,264 already expired authorizations and another 251 that were ending in autumn. These are the $500 billion (actually $516 billion) flagged by Musk and Ramaswamy. Unauthorized appropriations are increasing. Ten years ago, Congress spent $294 billion on 260 expired federal programs.
To be sure, half a billion dollars in “zombie spending and programs” (as they have been called) is not a good thing. Partly, it is a product of Congress eschewing an old practice: writing laws that authorize permanent or near-permanent appropriations. The Small Business Administration can receive funds forever, and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was authorized through the year 2090.
The broken congressional budget product does not help matters. More and more frequently, Congress enacts unauthorized appropriations through continuing resolutions, laws that essentially say, “Every agency should keep spending as it did last year.”
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More fundamentally, skyrocketing unauthorized appropriations are a symptom of the sprawl of the federal government. Every time Congress creates a new program, it adds another item to a future Congress’s list to oversee and reauthorize. With 441 federal agencies administering untold thousands of programs, it is inevitable that authorizations would expire.
Can the DOGE do anything about this situation? Certainly, it helpfully drew attention to the problem. Cutting spending, however, will require it and Trump administration heavyweights to huddle with the legislators who hold the purse strings to separate the good agencies and policies from the bad. Should Congress abolish spending on the 21st Century Cures Act, which funds medical research on opioid addiction and tick-borne diseases? What about the Federal Election Commission, which was last reauthorized in 1981? It will be a messy and frustrating process, but it has to be done for the DOGE to plausibly claim “Mission accomplished.”
Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and edits UnderstandingCongress.
