Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget, and underestimate the difficulty of spending cuts.
Growing Government is Easy, Shrinking It is Hard. DOGE faces formidable political, procedural & even Constitutional hurdles. Congress has exclusive power to tax & spend. The Impoundment Act forbids Presidents from refusing to spend appropriated funds. The Administrative Procedures Act lays out mandatory, time-consuming steps to regulate or deregulate. The Federal Advisory Commission Act limits outside advisory entities, requiring open meetings, formal chartering, balanced membership, public involvement, and reporting. And Congress usually opposes slimming the government workforce since it impacts so many districts — “only 15% of the 2.19 million civilian full-time federal employees in the United States work in the Washington metro area.”
