Elon Musk speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Credit: Flickr/GageSkidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Here’s our problem
Trump is lying when he says he is empowering a team of outsiders to slash wasteful bureaucracy, but it’s easy to see why that’s an attractive idea. Working people have to pay taxes out of our shrinking paychecks, but we don’t get anywhere near enough in return.
The vital services that the government does provide – Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, postal service, workplace safety regulation, environmental protection, etc. – are badly underfunded. Instead, a huge portion of our tax dollars go to line the pockets of executives at weapons manufacturers and enrich corporations that leech off of government contracts in other areas.
The con game of billionaires
Trump has put the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, in charge of what he’s calling the “Department of Government Efficiency”. Their approach is the typical kind of arrogance you’d expect from billionaire CEOs who never worked a day in their lives: The “problem” is that most public workers are lazy, so if we conduct mass firings then we can squeeze the same amount of work out of the remaining employees while saving money. They claim they can cut $2 trillion out of the annual federal budget.
The total size of government spending right now is around $6.7 trillion. On the campaign trail, Trump promised not to touch Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but about half of the federal budget is spent on these programs. Even if Musk and Trump ended the majority of all other programs and fired the people working there, they still would not be able to meet their $2 trillion goal.
So Trump can either let the billionaires slash the most important lifelines to working people that have existed for generations, or they can ignore their goal and just focus on areas like education, the environment, workplace safety so that they can destroy everything that makes it harder for corporations to reap the maximum possible profits at the expense of the people and the planet.
The real answer for the working class
If there is one area of the federal budget that is truly bloated, it’s the Pentagon. About a trillion dollars every year goes to war spending. Most of that is part of the Pentagon’s official budget, but it’s also hidden in other places like the Department of Energy (responsible for nuclear weapons) or paying interest on debt the government took out to pay for endless wars. A huge portion of this goes to private corporations whose executives make millions a year – just five “defense” contractors got $140 billion in 2024. And of course it’s not the kids of these executives who have to go off and fight in the wars they encourage for profit. They send our kids to die instead.
Redirecting money sucked up by the war machine will go a long way to making sure the government can maintain a comprehensive set of programs that guarantees the essentials of a decent life to all workers – things like healthcare, education, housing and a clean environment.
But realistically we’ll also need new sources of revenue. The rich say that taxing them is theft, but the real theft happens at work when they take the fruits of our labor and sell them for a profit. Whether it means taxing the rich or seizing their corporations outright, a real solution for the working class will need to involve the redistribution of wealth from the unthinkably rich to the rest of us.
This article is also available as a downloadable pamphlet here.
