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The DOGE Budget: Money for War... and Not Much Else
The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that Eisenhower warned against.
Apr 24, 2025
Under the guise of efficiency, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs and agencies that are the backbone of America’s civilian government. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and plans to shut down the Department of Education are just the most visible examples of a campaign that includes layoffs of budget experts, public health officials, scientists, and other critical personnel whose work undergirds the daily operations of government and provides the basic services needed by businesses, families, and individuals alike. Many of those services can make the difference between solvency and poverty, health and illness, or even, in some cases, life and death for vulnerable populations.
The speed with which civilian programs and agencies are being slashed in the second Trump era gives away the true purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In the context of the Musk-Trump regime, “efficiency” is a cover story for a greed-driven ideological campaign to radically reduce the size of government without regard for the human consequences.
The first two months of the Trump-Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic.
So far, the only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is—don’t be shocked!—the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed—finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in—yes!—other military programs without any actual reductions in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7, President Donald Trump announced that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military... $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.”
So far, cuts to make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons contractors have barely been touched—hardly surprising given that Elon Musk himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.
The legitimacy of his role should, of course, be subject to question. After all, he’s an unelected billionaire with major government contracts who, in recent months, seemed to have garnered more power than the entire cabinet combined. But cabinet members are subject to Senate confirmation, as well as financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules. Not Musk, though. Not only hasn’t he been vetted by Congress, but he’s been allowed to maintain his role in SpaceX.
A Hollow Government?
The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in the early years of the Cold War. And mind you, all of that’s true before Republican hawks in Congress like Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who is seeking $100 billion more in Pentagon spending than its officials have asked for, even act.
What’s at stake, however, goes well beyond how the government spends its money. After all, such decisions are being accompanied by an assault on basic constitutional rights like freedom of speech and a campaign of mass deportations that already includes people with the legal right to remain in the United States. And that’s not to mention the bullying and financial blackmailing of universities, law firms, and major media outlets in an attempt to force them to bow down to the administration’s political preferences.
In fact, the first two months of the Trump-Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic, a move that undermines our ability to preserve, no less expand, the fundamental rights that are supposed to be the guiding lights of American democracy. Those rights have, of course, been violated to one degree or another throughout this country’s history, but never like this. The current crackdown threatens to erase the hard-won victories of the civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights movements that had brought this country closer to living up to its professed commitments to freedom, tolerance, and equality.
Back in 2019, right-wing populist and Trump buddy Steve Bannon told PBS “Frontline” that the key to a future victory was to increase the “muzzle velocity” of extremist policy changes, so that opponents of the MAGA movement wouldn’t even know what hit them. “All we have to do,” he said then, “is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
The Trump/Musk administration is now implementing just such a strategy in a staggering fashion.
Sparing the Pentagon
Despite a certain amount of noise about DOGE-driven efficiencies at the Pentagon, the department has indeed been spared the fate of civilian outfits like the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education, which have been either decimated or are slated for elimination altogether.
A proposal to lay off 60,000 civilian employees at the Pentagon will have harsh consequences for those expecting to lose their jobs, but it is only 5% of the department’s workforce of 700,000 government employees and another more than half a million individuals under contract. By contrast, the workforce of USAID, which offered a peaceful helping hand to countries around the world, was rapidly reduced from 10,000 to less than 300.
The goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th century, in the proverbial dust.
In addition, the layoffs of research scientists and public health experts may prove to have disastrous consequences down the road by reducing the government’s ability to prevent or respond to infectious diseases and possible pandemics like new variants of Covid-19 or the bird flu. To compound the problem, the administration has ordered the firing of 1 in 5 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is now pressing that agency to terminate more than one-third of its outside contracts.
In addition, the almost instant firing of independent government inspectors general, who were charged with overseeing government waste, fraud, and abuse, at the start of Trump’s second term in office bodes anything but well for policing an administration already awash in conflicts of interest. Worse yet, the freezing of actions by the civil rights division of the Justice Department will allow racial injustice to flourish without the slightest meaningful legal pushback.
Then there are the plans of both the Trump administration and House Republicans to slash programs from Medicaid to Social Security to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that serve tens of millions of Americans. In addition, there have already been staff cuts at the Social Security Administration, as well as steps taken to make it harder to apply for benefits there, and that’s undoubtedly just the beginning. In the future, there could be devastating direct benefit cuts to a program that serves more than 70 million Americans. And such crucial programs may, in their own fashion, end up on the chopping block, in part to make way for a planned multi-trillion-dollar tax cut geared mainly—you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn—to helping individuals at the high end of the income scale.
In short, the goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th century, in the proverbial dust.
The Pentagon Exception
While most government agencies are either under siege or fear that they will be so in relatively short order, one agency has largely escaped the budget cutter’s knife: the Pentagon. In 2024, that agency (including nuclear warhead work done at the Department of Energy) already received an astonishing $915 billion, accounting for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget that year.
Meanwhile, as a New York Times analysis recently showed, the revenues of major weapons contractors have barely been touched. So far, General Dynamics (with a loss of less than 1%) and Leidos (with a loss of 7%) are the only firms among the top 10 weapons contractors to experience any kind of reduction in revenues from DOGE’s efforts.
One possible tradeoff within the Pentagon could be a move away from big platforms like aircraft carriers and piloted combat aircraft toward faster, nimbler, more easily produced systems based on applications of artificial intelligence, including swarms of drones. Elon Musk is already a longtime critic of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, which he’s slammed as “the worst military value for money” in the history of Pentagon procurement. His solution, however, is ever more advanced drones, presumably produced by his Silicon Valley allies.
But there is another possibility: The Pentagon might further boost its budget so that it can fund systems large and small, simultaneously feeding both the big contractors and the emerging military tech firms. After all, despite Musk’s critique, the president only recently announced that Boeing will produce a new plane, the F-47 (that “47” being—you guessed it!—in honor of America’s 47th president).
If there is a move toward tradeoffs between existing systems and new tech, both sides will have ample lobbying clout at their disposal. After all, the Silicon Valley crowd is literally embedded in the Trump administration from Musk to Vice President JD Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, the founder of the military-tech firm Palantir. Shortly after graduating from Yale Law School, Vance took a job at Mithril, a venture capital firm owned by Thiel. When Vance left that firm in 2019 to run for the Senate in Ohio, he did so with $15 million in backing from Thiel.
And Thiel is just one of the tech moguls backing Vance. An analysis by CBS News found that:
Vance, a relative newcomer to national politics, has assiduously courted billionaires and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling memoirist of despair, drugs, and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket that could seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The conservative New York Post summarized the state of play in an article headline in July 2024: “Silicon Valley Cheers Vance Pick as More Tech Billionaires Back Trump.” And keep in mind that Musk and Vance are not the only advocates for the military-tech sector embedded in the Trump administration. Stephen Feinberg, second-in-charge at the Pentagon, worked for Cerberus Capital, an investment firm that has a history of investing in the handgun and defense industries. And Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been selected to serve as the deputy secretary of the Army. A recent analysis by Bloomberg, in fact, found that “more than a dozen people with ties to Thiel—including current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefited from his investments and charitable giving—have been folded into the Trump administration.”
For their part, the Big Five arms contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, still have a firm foothold in Congress, having made millions in campaign contributions, employed hundreds of lobbyists serving on commissions that influence military spending and strategy, and placed their facilities in a majority of the states and districts in the country. Even if some in the Pentagon tried to phase out the F-35, Congress might well add funds to that institution’s budget request to save the program.
Recent procurement decisions suggest that there may be a desire in both Congress and the Trump administration to finance traditional contractors and emerging tech firms alike. The two largest recent program announcements—Boeing’s selection as the prime contractor for that F-47 next generation combat aircraft and President Trump’s commitment to a “Golden Dome” defense system supposedly geared to protecting the entire United States from incoming missiles—will offer ample opportunities to both traditional arms firms and emerging military tech companies. The procurement phase of the F-47 program could cost up to $20 billion, but as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has noted, that $20 billion will be “just seed money. The total costs coming down the road will be hundreds of billions of dollars.” Meanwhile, General Atomics and Anduril are competing to build drone “wingmen” that would work in coordination with those future F-47s in battle situations.
At this point, President Trump’s Golden Dome isn’t a fully fleshed out concept, but count on one thing: Attempting to meet his goal of a comprehensive, leakproof defense against missiles would require building large numbers of interceptors and new military satellites woven together with advanced communications and targeting systems, at a potential cost over time of hundreds of billions of dollars. And while the big weapons firms may have an inside track on building the hardware for the Golden Dome, emerging tech firms are better positioned to produce the software, targeting, surveillance, and communications components of the system.
Golden Dome is poised to go forward despite the fact that, as Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has asserted, “It has been long understood that defending against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is technically and economically unfeasible.” But that reality won’t stem the flow of massive quantities of tax dollars into the project, no matter how unrealistic it may be, since profits from producing it will be all too realistic.
Resistance Rising?
There are signs of growing resistance to the Musk-Trump agenda from lawsuits, to rallies against the oligarchy led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), to a boycott of Musk’s Tesla automobiles. Such efforts will need to be supplemented by the involvement of millions more people, including Trump supporters hurt by his cuts to essential programs that had helped them stay above water financially. The outcome of all this may be uncertain, but the stakes simply couldn’t be higher.
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The Uncertain Future of Student Aid Shows Trump Doesn’t Think Education Is a Right
Trump and his lackeys putting the Department of Education in limbo is probably part of the plan to eviscerate any sense of a national commitment to higher education for all.
Apr 13, 2025
The Trump administration has assigned itself the mission of ruining education in the United States. From attacks on DEI to attaching themselves to conservative education activists, a blatantly obvious result of the Trump administration will be to make education inaccessible for anyone who is not wealthy and white.
A prime example is financial aid. The administration hasn’t yet stated where Federal Student Aid (FSA) and the application system it administers, Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), would be placed if President Donald Trump succeeds in his entirely misguided assault on the Department of Education. FAFSA is the standardized form that students fill out every year to receive federal assistance in paying for college, grad school, med school, law school, etc. FSA, by way of the FAFSA, now services an estimated 17 million students per year. FAFSA ensures millions of students across the country can obtain an education and pursue a career of their choice. Without it, how can students who do not come from privilege pay some exorbitant amount of money in tuition?
Reportedly, President Trump is considering moving the agency (and thus the system) to the Department of Commerce, run by Howard Lutnick. Small Business Administration (SBA) Chief Kelly Loeffler, best known for her insider trader scandal, wants to move the program to her agency. This would more than quadruple the SBA’s loan portfolio after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already cut “a few hundred” of SBA’s probationary staff.
Imagine AI trying to help students complete their financial aid.
Both Commerce and SBA disburse loans. SBA actually offers a myriad of different loans, even some specific to women. The problem is that with the massive reduction in the federal workforce, how can Loeffler and her skeleton staff manage to serve the needs of approximately 17 million students per year? Loeffler has only suggested moving FAFSA, not FSA (meaning the trained administrative staff) to SBA.
While the agency has grown over the years from serving just under 48,000 loans in 2022 to over 70,000 in 2024, especially after the cuts from DOGE, it does not have the dedicated workforce to service the needs of students in the way FSA can. SBA’s peak in 2024, prior to being kneecapped by Musk, was approximately 70,242 loans. That is nowhere near the average of 17 million students that FSA is used to aiding. Especially given the 2024 FAFSA mishap in which Education’s (well intentioned) attempts to streamline the application for students led to issues of communication between both students and the agency, and even an inability to process applications. It does not help that the Education Department already contracts out to lenders like Nelnet who already are keeping people in debt for longer than they should be. Students will be waiting for their federal dollars, and graduates will be forever saddled with debt.
For its part, Commerce (whose IT system similarly was hit with Elon Musk’s DOGE sledgehammer) offers flexible loans for mortgages and cars, but again, the type of loan servicing is entirely different for student borrowers. Commerce also has some issues with technology and modernization (include identity authentication and even its financial systems), which in the entirely digital landscape that is FAFSA would probably impact students in a way that would inhibit their ability to successfully complete their applications
A third and no more viable option for students is turning FSA into a government-owned enterprise. Rather than scrapping FSA, Project 2025 proposed spinning it off into a “new government corporation with professional governance and management.” A government corporation is a company created by Congress to achieve specific policy goals. This would turn FSA into something akin to Amtrak.
Now, Musk would make the argument that these loan serving agencies indicate why the federal workforce should be replaced with AI. Experts say this would be a terrible idea that would lead to chaos. CEO of the Work3 Institute, an AI advisory firm, Deborah Perry Piscione points out that while AI can streamline some paperwork, it just can’t replace civil servants. Piscione gave the example of an AI chatbot that does not understand the unique elements of a veteran applying for benefits. Imagine AI trying to help students complete their financial aid.
The Education Department already utilizes AI to answer rudimentary questions in their call centers. Last September, during the rollout of the new FAFSA, three-quarters of the calls were left unanswered. AI in its current form simply does not have the processing power to service the 17 million students who need aid.
A study from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection board MSPB) found that downsizing agencies ultimately undermined the mission they were supposed to accomplish. ED has the smallest federal workforces of the cabinet agencies, so rolling it into other agencies already saddled with existing duties would exacerbate these problems. Increasing the federal workforce, and curtailing the reliance on AI, probably would have ensured that three-quarters of phone calls would not have been missed.
The Trump administration seemingly does not believe a quality education is a right. Trump and his lackeys putting the Department of Education in limbo is probably part of the plan to eviscerate any sense of a national commitment to higher education for all. Leaving FAFSA in limbo will have a material impact on students. Just last year, almost 18 million students filled out this form, a slight uptick from the average of 17 million. The groups that are most likely to receive aid are Black students, women, and dependents (most likely to be minors).
A little history lesson for you: FSA was established under former President Lyndon Johnson through the Higher Education Act to ensure students could pay for college. Students would fill out the Common Financial Aid Form, which was later replaced by the FAFSA in 1992 during the HEA’s reauthorization. Even in the 1960s, Washington politicians knew that college was inaccessible to anyone who was not well off. The Trump administration’s decision to dismantle ED, and put millions of students at risk, will have dire consequences that will ripple across decades.
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Won’t DOGE Think of the Children?
Children are bearing the brunt of upheaval in Washington; the destruction of Head Start will harm even more.
Apr 10, 2025
Children have rarely been a national priority in the United States. Lawmakers have historically chosen to set aside the needs of children, families, and educators, with Head Start being one of the few examples of meaningful investment in children’s futures. But amid recent cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services, including layoffs at the Administration for Children and Families (which funds Head Start), the future of this program is uncertain.
Effectively destroying an essential program like Head Start and dismantling the Department of Education (DOE) and other federal agencies is cruel, irresponsible, and short-sighted. Childcare costs more than ever, and Head Start and Early Head Start, which provide access to high-quality early learning programs for children from low-income backgrounds, are lifelines. Without Head Start, hundreds of thousands of children will go without safe places to learn and grow. Parents, especially women, depend on it and other forms of childcare to stay in the workforce. Unless care is available, many are forced to cut hours or leave their jobs altogether, hurting household incomes and overall economic growth.
“It’s going to affect a lot of families that are already struggling,” Early Head Start educator Sandra Dill, who runs a family childcare program in Connecticut, said recently.
State-based solutions will help chip away at the vast problems facing the early childhood education sector, but wiping away Head Start and Early Head Start will set us back for years—possibly generations—to come.
At the same time, childcare providers, including family childcare educators who run small businesses in licensed, home-based settings, are facing exorbitant and rising prices for basic supplies that they need to keep their programs running. Without much-needed funding from the federal government, many of these programs—already existing on razor-thin margins—will be at risk of shutting their doors and leaving families without care options, worsening an already dire childcare shortage.
Amid the layoffs of thousands of government employees including Head Start administrators, there will certainly be chaos and confusion in the coming weeks among programs and the families who rely on them, with a lack of understanding of how already approved funds will be distributed. This will likely be similar to what ensued amid the federal funding freeze in January, with some programs temporarily closing their doors, unable to access funding for weeks, and families going without care.
Since the pandemic, the home-based childcare educators in All Our Kin’s networks have seen a significant surge in toddlers struggling with language and learning delays. Heath and Human Services and the DOE provide critically important early intervention services, including for children aged 0 to 3. Without these programs, fewer children will have a strong start in life. More will go without healthy meals, and fewer will have opportunities for social-emotional development or be prepared to succeed in kindergarten and beyond, and will have fewer opportunities for social and emotional development. Actions to shrink these departments in the name of cost cutting could overburden states and ultimately lead to far greater societal and economic consequences.
We are encouraged by bipartisan progress at the state level. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has proposed increased investments to help pay childcare providers competitive wages. In New York, there is a proposal from Gov. Kathy Hochul for additional funds to be set aside for family childcare providers to make renovations and repairs to their programs. And universal childcare has gained momentum in states like New York, Michigan, Oregon, Vermont, and New Mexico.
State-based solutions will help chip away at the vast problems facing the early childhood education sector, but wiping away Head Start and Early Head Start will set us back for years—possibly generations—to come.
Every child deserves a high-quality, affordable education, especially in the critical formative years of their lives. If we want a strong economy, we must save Head Start and protect the futures of the children and programs it supports.
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