“President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a promise to slash spending by trillions of dollars and balance the federal budget.
But, as the first fiscal year of his second term came to a close, progress had not been made on either of those goals.
Despite the high-profile efforts of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the 2025 federal fiscal year ended with the federal government having spent more money than it did in the previous fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported
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The CBO’s end-of-year report helpfully spells out which parts of the federal budget saw the biggest year-over-year spending increases. Overwhelmingly, and unsurprisingly, the biggest increases were for the so-called entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. For those three programs, spending increased by a combined $245 billion.
Other big spending increases were recorded by the Pentagon ($38 billion) and the Department of Veterans Affairs ($41 billion), where the increase was driven by the rising cost of health care facilities. Interest payments on the national debt rose by $80 billion compared to the previous fiscal year’s totals.
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the CBO’s report serves to underline the same fiscal reality that plagued the DOGE project: Cutting silly government contracts and foreign aid might be a worthwhile effort, but that won’t make a dent in the budget deficit. Any serious effort at fiscal reform has to focus on the areas of the budget that are growing year over year—which, realistically, means looking at entitlement programs.
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There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that anything will change in the next three years. For one, Trump’s track record after nearly five years as president does not suggest he cares very much about actually cutting spending. The coming years will also bring greater headwinds to any attempts at reducing the deficit. That’s due in part to the expected increases in entitlement spending, as well as the fiscal effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended and expanded the 2017 tax cuts in ways that will likely add to the deficit.”
People are dying because they are not getting medicines that U.S. Aid used to bring them. Many of these medicines were already donated, but they go expired because U.S. Aid, who would be delivering them, was gutted by Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE.
“The administration is using a process known as “rescission” to pursue the cuts, which allows the White House to ask Congress to claw back money it has already approved. The process has not been successfully used in over two decades, and the Senate rejected a rescission request in 2018, during Trump’s first term.
Lawmakers must approve the cuts within 45 days of the request — July 18 — or Trump is required by law to spend the money. The administration has said that this could be the first of several rescission requests.”
“DOGE’s aggressive cost-cutting efforts, led by a staff Musk brought in, are expected to continue even after he formally leaves his role as a special government employee. Both Republicans and Democrats also widely expect the tech billionaire, who poured $290 million of his own money into the 2024 elections, to continue to be a major political player.”
“Staff reductions and reassignments led by DOGE are slowing the pace of claims processing as field offices lose longtime staff and gain a smaller number of inexperienced replacements. DOGE-driven changes to the agency’s website are causing crashes almost every day, and phone customers complain about dropped calls and long wait times. A DOGE-imposed spending freeze is leading to shortages of basic office supplies, from printer cartridges to the phone headsets staff need to do their jobs.
And on Friday, Social Security leaders told employees that the agency was ending a security check, developed at DOGE’s request, that was meant to root out allegedly fraudulent claims filed over the phone, according to three employees familiar with the situation and an email obtained by The Washington Post. But the measure – which involved placing a three-day hold on all phone claims as other staffers checked into the caller’s background – had only identified a couple of potential fraud cases while causing significant delays in claims processing, two employees said.
Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who is now at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said there were already safeguards in place to detect fraud through the agency’s phone service. DOGE’s efforts have only delayed claims processing and, like most of the team’s attempts to reshape Social Security, placed serious stress on the agency, she said.
“So much of this is self-inflicted wounds,” Romig said.
This account of turmoil within the Social Security Administration is based on interviews with eight current and former employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private deliberations. The Post also reviewed more than a dozen pages of internal agency records and communications.”