‘Morning Joe’: DOGE ‘Is a Scam; They’re Never Going to Get the $2 Trillion So They Need to Just Stop Pretending’

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Ramaswamy: “And I want to emphasize the individual federal employees are mostly not bad people actually, because most human beings are not bad people. To the contrary most people who are federal employees are doing what they do because they believe they’re serving their country, and I respect that. (...) I’m hopeful it’s going to be even good for many of the individuals who may make a transition from government service back to the private sector.”
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BRZEZINSKI: “That was Vivek Ramaswamy who is part of a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk and has pushed for making mass cuts to the federal workforce insisting those very cuts will be beneficial to government workers. Joining us now former Treasury official and ‘Morning Joe’ economic analyst Steve Rattner.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Steve, let’s just cut straight to this and I know you’re going to go through these charts, but this is something that when I hear these two guys talking about how they’re going to get $2 trillion from the budget, it’s — it’s a joke, and it’s a joke because this is something you and I have been obsessed about for a very long time, the national debt, getting the deficit under control, and I just — you know just — just looking at your first chart here. I mean people need to understand Social Security and Medicare make up about 50 percent of what the government spends. You add defense and veterans benefits that’s another 20 percent. So you’re up to 70 percent. You then add debt and and and how much it costs to service that debt that’s another 10 percent. So Steve, before they even start talking about cutting these so-called federal employees that are bankrupting us, the United States government has already spent 80 percent of its budget on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, vets, defense, and interest on the debt. So I — I just I love some of these other numbers, and again forgive me for — for — for like killing Hamlet in the first act here, but oh let’s cut law enforcement, that’s 1 percent of the budget, oh let’s cut sciences and medical research, we spend too much on that they may be saying — one percent of the budget, ag, one percent of the budget. Transportation, those pork barrel projects it’s going to bankrupt us — it’s only 2 percent of the budget. Again I will actually let you explain this far better than I right now, but this is a scam unless they’re going to slash Social Security and Medicare and the — and — and Veterans Affairs they’re never going to get the $2 trillion so they need to just stop pretending.”
Rattner: “You know Joe I feel like Vanna White I’m just turning letters up here and you’re actually Pat Sajak telling people how it is.”
SCARBOROUGH: “It just makes me — it makes me so mad.”
Rattner: But I’m not — I’m not — I’m not —“ [crosstalk]
SCARBOROUGH: “It’s — it’s so — it’s so disingenuous.”
Rattner: “I’m — I’m happy to be your letter guy. But you look you said it exactly right Joe this is a completely disingenuous, unrealistic, ridiculous idea for the reasons you all said, that only 25 percentof the budget can really be cut and even that you rattled off a lot of programs that most Americans would say like are really important to them. And so you’re trying to cut — you know I can do a little bit of math — you’re trying to cut $2 trillion but you’ve only got $1.5 trillion dollars of stuff that you can cut, and that would be cutting all of it. Now I would say Trump has intimated about cutting some money from Medicaid, we’re going to talk right over here about veterans, where there’s some stuff on the chopping block, but what Musk and Ramasamy have done as a first approximation is they’ve identified about $500 billion of spending through a complicated legislative quirk which I’m not going to get into, they think they can actually cut without Congress. But let’s just — but let’s just give it as an example of the things they would like to cut. Veterans Health Care, $119 billion, eliminate health care for veterans. We’re going to talk about the impact of all this stuff in a second. NIH, $47 billion, Pell Grants for education $22 billion dollars, Head Start, we all know what that is, $12 billion, the FBI — maybe they’d actually like to cut that, $11 billion, these by the way would zero all this stuff out, these are not just trims, this is eliminating this stuff. Federal Prisons, the SEC and so forth. And all of that adds up to $516 billion, and so there’s still a long way a long way from their $2 trillion target, even if they got all this stuff, and even if people accepted this. So yes, Joe, your opening premise is right, it is ridiculous.”
LEMIRE: “So Musk and Ramasamy are heading to the Hill today to start pitching these cuts. We should note though by the time they arrive late afternoon the Senate will expect to have gone home by then. So they’re still learning on the job I suppose. Steve, you mentioned the VA and NIH are targets here. Talk to us about those cuts. What they’d mean?”
Rattner: “Yeah. I just want to give these as examples of what the — how heavy the political lift would be to try to get this done. You’re talking about 6.2 million veterans who are receiving health care from the Veterans Administration. And that number — this is a 2021 number, the most recent one we have — but that number is only going to grow. For example they pass the PACT Act, which is to protect veterans who are hurt in burn pits and things like that. That passed by an overwhelming bipartisan consensus. So imagine the idea you go back then a year or two later and you say, ‘I know you pass this thing by a bipartisan consensus now we want to eliminate it. It just doesn’t stand the test of reality. Yhen you talk about the NIH. The NIH is a truly great organization. It funds basic research that the private sector won’t fund because there’s not obvious commercial use for it. Put aside lung cancer, which had a lot to do with smoking, taking up smoking, cessation of smoking, but the NIH’s impact, and it’s not just the NIH, but they played a big role in all these different cancers that have come down down down in terms of incidents, deaths from these cancers, from colon and rectum, breast, prostate, lung cancer, we talked about, cervix, and stomach, all these cancers have come down and you have the NIH to thank for a lot of it.”