Former President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that he’d think about giving billionaire Elon Musk a job slashing the federal authorities if he returns to the White Home subsequent yr.
Trump additionally insisted, oddly, that no person would even discover.
Musk, one in all Trump’s largest monetary backers, has stated that he would subtract trillions from federal spending — and stated the cuts would lead to “some non permanent hardship” for the nation.
Talking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity in a Tuesday interview, Trump stated there have been “a whole lot of roles” Musk may absorb a brand new U.S. administration, however that Musk has been targeted on spending.
“He feels there’s such waste, fraud and abuse in our budgets. And he’s proper. And he’s an awesome value cutter,” Trump stated. “And he’ll lower prices with out anyone even understanding it. No one’s going to know. No one’s going to really feel it. He’ll lower prices, and he feels he can save $2 trillion. If he does that, our funds is greater than balanced.”
Trump has campaigned much less on value slicing than on mass deportations of migrants and focused tax cuts for particular voting teams, however Musk has taken on an more and more outstanding position within the marketing campaign and provided to function one thing of a czar of funds slicing. And Musk hasn’t shied from stating that spending cuts may create materials hardship.
“We’ve got to scale back spending to reside inside our means. And that essentially entails some non permanent hardship, however it is going to guarantee long-term prosperity,” Musk stated final week in a digital city corridor occasion. “President Trump is supportive that everybody’s taking a haircut right here as a result of we’ve received to — America’s received to reside inside its means, and we will’t be a wastrel.”
Musk has stated that he may simply lower $2 trillion out of the federal authorities’s greater than $6 trillion in annual spending. It’s arduous to think about how no person would discover a lower of that magnitude; shielding Social Safety, Medicare, veterans advantages and protection spending, as Trump would presumably need to do, may require a whopping 89% lower to every part else, together with well-liked packages like faculty lunches and nationwide parks, in addition to requirements like transportation and meals help.
In fact, the White Home doesn’t management spending — Congress does — and never even most Republican lawmakers would conform to such drastic cuts.
The president submits a funds define to Congress yearly, a symbolic doc that’s basically a press release of priorities. In his remaining funds despatched to Congress in 2020, Trump proposed about $3 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s rather a lot, however nonetheless rather a lot lower than $2 trillion in only one yr like Musk urged.
Trump’s administration claimed extra financial savings than that, although, together with by means of a plan to “rightsize” authorities and lower all annual company and program budgets — apart from these associated to protection — by 2% in unspecified methods for $1.55 trillion in financial savings, and $844 billion in well being care-related spending cuts that the CBO stated have been too imprecise to be evaluated.
In response to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Congress wound up spending trillions greater than anticipated, with Trump’s enthusiastic help, for issues like additional unemployment advantages, forgivable loans to companies and direct funds to nearly each grownup in America.
Jonathan Nicholson contributed reporting.
