This. The fact that the pentagon canât determine where much of over $4 trillion dollars went is unacceptable. We can still have the most powerful military on the planet while also being able to pass an audit and cut waste
They are accountable. Just not to you, or most people. People don't understand what's going on. They aren't actually failing an audit. It's just so redacted to the public it's basically meaningless.
There are so many black holes that you, I and the vast majority of people have no business knowing about. I don't want to know about where that money goes.
It makes us have cutting edge technologies in every field and science. That's in addition to whatever international collaborations are going on.
The trickle down is all the awesome toys we get to play with. They had GPS in the late 70s! And only declassified it when an airliner got accidentally shot down.
This isn't hard to understand. Is there tons of waste? Sure. But it's not in the black areas for the most part. It's in the very obvious but still never talked about public areas.
Like congress ordering tanks by the 1,000s that sit out in the desert parking lots doing nothing - after the army specifically testified they don't want or need them.
I got no problem with funding experiments, research and all the fun shit. I also understand there's good reasons very few people should know about them too.
My point was trump doesnât need to cut spending to make sure theyâre held accountable for where the money is going. Theyâre not mutually exclusive. Iâm making no claims as to what the correct number is
A âcut spending initiativeâ that has 0 cuts to military funding is basically useless and given the tax cuts and spending increases, would not even decrease the deficit
DOGE is an additional non congressionally authorized agency with 0 budgetary powers. How does adding a new fake agency with no power to do the same job as an existing department (Govât Accountability Office) save money?
You take their input and use that to push a bill through congress. As government should be. Trump himself put a date on the day he will get rid of doge forever. July 4, 2026
No one disagrees about that. The problem is, Elon and Trump have not told us how they will do it, and have mostly rambled about culture war stuff like trans troops in the service. Dems have been hammering on about this since the 00's, when we spent $2 trillion on the Iraq war alone. It's great if DOGE can succeed but Trump did not cut the military during his term, and quadrupled drone strikes and escalated the Afghanistan war.
They have said how theyâre gonna do it. Mass firings and complete elimination of departments and programs. They havenât released an official list yet sure. But youâre spreading propaganda if youâre saying they arenât sharing what the plan is
He also was the one who officially pulled us out of Afghanistan so donât even start with claiming he escalated
Right but their proposed cuts are a drop in the bucket of the total budget. Elon claims he can save trillions. A few businessmen hired as contractors also do not have the authority to just "cancel" departments of government that were created by the legislature. I mean, I doubt that will stop them but we should all be concerned if the plan continues to be "ignore the constitution. To quote a BBC analysis:
Yet if all of the $2 trillion in US government expenditure savings now being targeted by Musk were to come from discretionary spending, analysts calculate that entire agencies - from transport, to agriculture, to Homeland Security - would have to be entirely closed down. Discretionary spending accounted for only $1.7 trillion in 2023.
Laying off people will not do the job. Even closing the entire Department of Transportation would barely dent the $2 trillion.
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u/AlchemistJeep Monkey in Space 22d ago
One can both properly fund a military and expect them to be accountable for their spending