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When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy helped topple a spending bill in Congress, bringing the government to the brink of a shutdown, they demonstrated the clout that they will have as the leaders of a new waste-cutting effort.
But the funding bill that lawmakers ultimately approved failed to reflect spending restraint, underscoring the limits facing the effort, known as the Department of Government Efficiency. The federal government has become increasingly sprawling and Congress more fractious, making it difficult to put a dent in a national debt that has topped $36 trillion.
As Donald Trump prepares to take office in under a month, budget experts see little hope that his plan will shift the nation’s fiscal trajectory. Trump has pledged to preserve entitlement programs, and Republicans are loath to slash military spending. That leaves little space to scale back the biggest drivers of the debt.
Even as lawmakers talk about spending cuts and deficit reduction, they are preparing an expansion of the 2017 tax cuts that could cost the nation more than $4 trillion over a decade.
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