Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Checking up on Doge 100 days in. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. On President Trump's 100th day back at the White House, we've been looking at the widespread economic effects. A checkup now on the independent agency cutting programs and jobs at the federal government. Not a department, but called the Department of Government Efficiency.
Doge is a reference to a kind of cryptocurrency started as a joke. Led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, Doge claims to have saved the country $150 billion. Now, that is far short of what Musk promised, and analysts dispute even that number. Marketplace's Nova Suffo has more. You may remember that moment during last year's election when Elon Musk was asked how much spending he thought he could cut from the federal government. Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion. Yeah! Yeah!
Trump's Department of Government Efficiency went from promising $2 trillion in savings to $1 trillion to $150 billion. Jessica Riedel is a senior fellow focused on budget, tax, and economic policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. And they really only verified about $5 billion in savings or less than one-tenth of 1% of federal spending. Clearly,
Clearly, this is not successful by any means. There are savings to be found. Doge has been looking for waste, fraud and abuse. Experts say a good place to look is fraud. That's because we have actual figures, an estimate at least, of how much money the federal government loses to fraud. Rebecca Shea came up with that estimate. She's with the Government Accountability Office, the federal government's auditor.
The government loses between $233 billion to $521 billion annually in direct financial fraud loss. Shea based her findings on patterns of previous fraud.
The actual numbers are unknown because a lot of fraud goes undetected. So we don't have that information to tell us exactly where there's higher rates of fraud. Ferreting that out requires initially spending more money, not immediately slashing budgets, says Bobby Kogan. He is with the left-leaning think tank American Progress.
And he was a budget advisor in the Biden White House. It takes technical experts and it costs money to go after that fraud. And so what we've seen from the Trump administration has actually been the opposite. In the first 100 days of Trump's presidency, Doge has focused on waste and abuse, subjective terms. It's laid off federal employees, reduced health research funding, canceled numerous federal contracts and shrunk agencies.
And yet, all those cuts are not really making a dent in the federal government's spending, says Brendan Duke with the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. When we look at how much the federal government has spent this year, we see that it has spent more during this calendar year than it did over the comparable period last year or the year before. Spent more, not less.
In fact, the Nonprofit Partnership for Public Service says the firings, rehirings, employees put on leave all have a cost as much as $135 billion.
The bottom line, says Brendan Duke, is that the Trump administration's cost-cutting effort has been underwhelming at best because it has so far largely avoided targeting the biggest spending categories. One out of every $5 spent, it goes to Social Security. One out of every $4 spent goes to health insurance. So just off the bat,
That's about almost half of the federal budget. The easier-to-cut portion, so-called discretionary spending, accounts for just a third of total annual expenditures. In the coming weeks and months, Congress will be looking for more cuts as part of its budget-setting process. Those cuts could potentially come from Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, areas that are likely to prove more politically difficult to target.
I'm Nova Soffo for Marketplace. They've got LEOs. Why can't we have LEOs?
It stands for Communications Satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, has just launched the first set of a planned big fleet of LEOs. These rival the setup put up there by Elon Musk's company. The ones you can often see with the naked eye is a long choo-choo train in the night sky. Amazon wants to compete in the burgeoning field of Internet and phone service from space. Project Kuiper, K-U-I-P-E-R, after Gerard Kuiper, the late great planetary scientist.
President Trump travels to Michigan today where he's set to modify tariffs in a way that will be welcomed by car and truck companies. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer reports.
The president will apparently give automakers a break on some tariffs to keep them from piling on top of others they're paying for things like raw materials. This was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The journal says U.S. car manufacturers won't have to pay tariffs on steel and aluminum, and they could be reimbursed for duties they've already paid. A new tariff on imported auto parts is set to take effect this Saturday, but domestic automakers will apparently be reimbursed for parts
Part of that, the reimbursement will be based on the value of the car they're producing and will be phased out after two years. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is quoted as saying the deal is meant to reward companies making vehicles in the U.S. and give a runway to those that have committed to investing in the U.S. or expanding domestic manufacturing.
I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. Our producers are Ariana Rosas, Alex Schroeder, Jarrett Dang, and Erica Soderstrom. Our senior producer is Meredith Gerritsen-Morby. In Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio. You're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media. If there's one thing we know about social media, it's that misinformation is everywhere, especially when it comes to personal finance.
Financially Inclined from Marketplace is a podcast you can trust to help you get serious about your money so you can build a life you've always dreamed of. I'm the host, Janelia Espinal, and each week I ask experts important money questions, like how to negotiate job offers, how to choose a college that you can afford, and how to talk about money with friends and family. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcasts.