If waste reduction is to be anything more than a DOGE one-off, Congress has to change and rescind existing law. From T.L. Davis at tldavissubstack.com:
This cannot be said enough: Government overspending (waste, fraud and abuse) causes inflation. If Trump, or anyone else, wants to reduce inflation it can’t just come from unleashing domestic oil and gas production. While that helps, because every cost includes the cost of energy and the lower the cost of energy, there’s lower prices, that’s not the primary cause of inflation. It can rapidly accelerate it or decelerate it, but the cause, the actual initiation of inflation, is government overspending. What I mean by that is that some government spending actually increases production, but we’re way past that line.
Thanks to DOGE, we know that upwards of $2 trillion is nothing but waste. Money sent to foreign countries for no benefit to America. A lot of it funds the Democrat Party and donors to the Democrat Party; individual campaigns through backdoor NGO funding that provides kickbacks to the Democrat Party or individual candidates including RINOs who present themselves as opposition, but who are not.
This is more than mere malfeasance, the debt at this rate and the profligate needless and even harmful (in the case of censorship, etc.) spending associated with USAID and executive departments and agencies is driving the expectation of default. There are only a few things holding up the economic collapse of the United States: 1) a grace period for Trump to start sorting out the debt; 2) the lack of a viable reserve currency other than the dollar.
