'Almost impossible': Fact-checker says Elon Musk's math does not add up

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has promised to slash government waste and inefficiency and balance the budget through his Trump-approved independent task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — named after an internet meme.

But many of their examples of government waste are misleading, wrote Glenn Kessler for The Washington Post Fact-Checker — and worse, the simple math of their promises doesn't add up.

“In FY2023, the U.S. Government spent $6.16 trillion while only bringing in $4.47 trillion. The last budget surplus was in 2001. This trend must be reversed, and we must balance the budget,” DOGE's official account wrote on Musk's X platform. In other words, Kessler wrote, Musk is vowing to cut nearly $2 trillion from the annual budget.

That's "almost impossible," wrote Kessler, if you take even a cursory look at where the government actually spends money.

The three biggest federal expenditures, he wrote, are Social Security ($1.45 trillion), the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs ($1.1 trillion), and Medicare ($900 billion). Interest payments on the national debt are another $900 billion. And while you could make small cuts in some of these programs, all four of these categories are expected to increase over the next decade as the population ages.

So this is already over $4 trillion that can't be meaningfully reduced.

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The remainder of the budget, wrote Kessler, is everything else: Medicaid, food aid, grants to states for various partnerships and projects, scientific research, critical agencies like the National Weather Service, and the list goes on. For DOGE to meet its promise of balancing the budget absent new tax increases — and Trump has pledged to cut taxes on top of all this — pretty much the entire rest of the federal government that isn't defense and retirement programs would have to be eliminated.

DOGE has put forward a number of examples of government spending it considers to be wasteful, Kessler continued, but aside from the cost of these programs being negligible, many of them are more useful than Musk is making them sound.

For instance, DOGE criticized a $2.5 million Super Bowl ad for the Census — but in fact, Kessler noted, "for every 1 percent increase in mail-in responses [the Census Bureau] received, it would save $85 million sending workers door-to-door to collect information. So what appears to be a waste of money was intended to reduce spending over time."