MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A massive overhaul of the federal government is being promised. It's one of President-elect Donald Trump's big campaign pledges - to take a big axe to what he and his allies consider wasteful spending. He's tapped billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy to lead what's being called the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk claims they'll be able to cut $2 trillion from the nearly $7 billion (ph) federal budget. To get a sense of how that could be done or even why, we've called Maya MacGuineas. She's president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is a think tank that supports cutting federal spending and lowering the national debt. Maya MacGuineas, welcome. Thanks for joining us.
MAYA MACGUINEAS: Good morning.
MARTIN: From your perspective, what is the problem that needs to be fixed? Is it that the government spends too much or maybe does too much, or that it uses debt to pay for its spending? Because those are not the same things.
MACGUINEAS: They're not at all. We're a bipartisan organization, and we look at it as we borrow too much. And you could say we need to cut spending to borrow less. You could say we need to raise taxes to borrow less. You could be a big government or a small government person. We are neutral on those things. We just think the fact that we borrow to pay our bills which undermines our economic strength and our ability to respond to emergencies like COVID or recessions and our national security, and, frankly, it leaves us vulnerable to some kind of fiscal emergency down the road. We think that that is ill-advised and short-term policy. And so we advocate against using borrowing for paying our bills, except when they're emergencies and it's the right time to do so for economic reasons.
MARTIN: OK.
MACGUINEAS: But we've gotten to the point where we just do so politically because no one wants to pay for things.
MARTIN: Interesting. OK, so let's go to the president-elect's pledges. Elon Musk, whom he's enlisted in this effort, claims to be able to eliminate $2 trillion from the federal budget. As we said, it's a nearly $7 trillion budget. I'm trying to figure out how the math works because mandatory spending is about 66% of the budget, according to the 2022 budget. Then there's interest on the debt, which we just talked about. Discretionary spending is like 26% of the budget, and a large part of that is defense. So can he do that?
MACGUINEAS: Yeah, 2 trillion out of a $7 trillion budget. Wow. That is a heavy lift, and I think it will be much wiser to a kind of reasonable metric and try to truly meet it. A lot of times, we talk about budget numbers over two - 10 years. Two trillion over 10 years would make a lot of sense. But the truth is mandatory programs - defense, health care spending, all those things have to be on the table because that's some of the biggest areas where there are waste, fraud, abuse, inefficient program spending. So the first rule is, don't take anything off the table. Look at that $7 trillion budget. Look at regulations. Look at the way our computer systems talk to each other and think about where we can have efficiencies. But something well short of $2 trillion in a year is more reasonable and would be a huge win if we were able to find ways to do that.
MARTIN: And now, to that point, Republican and Democratic administrations have said that they want to do that. They want to cut government spending, or they want to cut red tape. Why is this so hard?
MACGUINEAS: Yeah, because every person's - any bit of waste in the government has a very strong constituency. Even programs that are outdated, don't work, don't do anything that we need anymore. There's somebody benefiting from them, and that somebody has a louder voice than the rest of us as taxpayers or the people who are suffering from long-term budget deficits are not going to make as big a deal about it. And so you have to realize that the programs, even if they're not done efficiently, they're incredibly popular. Redoing bureaucracy, clearly something that's long overdue, but that's going to have effect on real people, real lives and real workers. So it's not pain-free, which is why the government's basically given up on budgeting and not made choices. I think a set of fresh eyes would be really useful, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking this will be easy and just getting rid of, you know, things like shrimp racing funding. It's going to be real programs, and it's going to be real people.
MARTIN: Before we let you go. I do think it's fair to point out that Trump added a - his administration added $8.4 trillion to the debt in his first term. What would you like to see happen in the ideal world?
MACGUINEAS: And you make a really important point, which is you can talk a big game, but when Trump was in office last time, he made the debt worse, not better. And so we have to realize that the first thing to do is you pass a budget. You can't take anything off the table. Our biggest areas of waste are in health care, in national defense and in tax breaks for the well-off that run through the tax code. So you need to look at all of those programs. And I think we need to make sure that we get our computer systems actually working and talking to each other, update the technology that's used for this. And again, this needs to be part of an overall budget, rethinking of our national priorities. Let's not take a meat axe to the budget, but let's really look at every item and see what they can do.
MARTIN: That's Maya MacGuineas. She's president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Maya MacGuineas, thank you so much.
MACGUINEAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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