The Trump administration is spending more than the Biden administration, compared to the same period last year. This is no small feat, as the proxies that stood in for the senile and incontinent former president spent at an extravagant pace in their final year, even by federal government standards.
Fiscal year 2025 is virtually guaranteed to produce a deficit in excess of $2 trillion. The current year-to-date deficit stands at $1.05 trillion seven months in, with the April surplus now behind us.
The continuing resolution passed in March guaranteed continuation of the spending status quo for the remainder of the fiscal year, ensuring no coming to grips with the fundamental problems at issue despite full Republican control of the Congress and the executive branch. When Thomas Massie—the lone dissenter in the House—pointed this out, he was pilloried by Trump.
Looking into the future, we now have the “Big Beautiful” spending bill currently circulating through the US congress. The results of this bill—which specifically includes a $1 trillion defense budget—are certain to increase deficits and debt further. The CBO estimates it will have a marginal impact of +3.8 trillion on the US debt balance over the next 10 years.
And yet, many believe the Trump administration remains sincere about their overtures toward substantial spending cuts, also known as “draining the swamp.” Stubbornly ignoring reality, some even believe they have delivered on such promises. By their lights, the administration has already made—and continues to make—substantial spending cuts while shrinking the size and scope of government.
What are we to make of these seeming contradictions? Is the Trump administration trying in earnest—but failing—to shrink the size of government? Or is there a better explanation?
Man of the Century
When describing the current US fiscal situation, we hear a frequent evaluation from conservative and libertarian types. In stupefied adoration, they claim: “The richest, most successful businessman in America—a genius who builds spaceships and robots in his spare time—couldn’t cut spending in any meaningful way despite his best efforts. If someone of his ability can’t do it, we are doomed.”
When confronted with such a mess of logical contradictions, one should check the underlying premises. They will find them lacking.
First, Elon Musk is not a successful businessman in any genuine sense of those words. He runs a handful of businesses that each lose money serially despite massive government subsidies, both direct and indirect. They are zombie companies that would not survive in the absence of the loose money, fiat-fueled, asset bubble regime in which we find ourselves—what Jim Chanos calls the “Golden Age of Fraud.”
Musk’s wealth accrues from this regime, where stock prices—and therefore, personal wealth—are tied to propaganda rather than profits. Because of that, he must constantly exercise his cultural outreach, appealing to this group and then that group to create an image that will support his stock price in spite of his cash flow statement. This requires a certain skill, no doubt, but it has nothing to do with business acumen.
In order to execute such cultural outreach effectively, someone like Musk has to constantly say things that aren’t true, promise things that aren’t delivered, and profess positions that he does not hold.
Paraphrasing Churchill—describing himself over a hundred years ago—Musk does not care so much for the principles he occasionally advocates as for the impression which his words produce and the reputation they give him. He is a performance artist and a rent-seeker par excellence, but a businessman he is not.
Second, and more importantly, productive ability has nothing at all to do with effective government as practiced. Government is an exercise of power over the governed. In exercising that power, efficiency with “stewarded” taxpayer funds—which are, in fact, stolen under threat of force—is not a virtue and would, in fact, work directly against the interests of government.
The Trump administration recruited a skilled rent-seeker, rather than a serious person, to address the serious issues of government profligacy—the inflationary impact of which is felt by all American families—because the real goals of government are at odds with their professed goals.
James Burnham, in his book The Machiavellians, explains that governments—democracies in particular—rely on propaganda to manipulate, persuade, and mislead the ruled, thus gaining consent. This does not mean that politicians simply lie, although that is often true. It means that they use language—which they know to be false—to achieve ends related to the attainment and consolidation of political power.
Trump’s use of Musk, therefore, was cynical politics at its worst—or best, depending on your point of view. Musk was paraded in front of tens of millions of low-information voters and supporters to whom the notion that his businesses are entirely reliant on government subsidies yet still lose money would come as an uninteresting revelation. Far from execution of cost-cutting measures, his true political value therefore lies in his ability to promise and convince masses of the ill-informed without delivering a single result.
Burnham distinguished the propaganda, or formal meaning, of political communication with the real meaning—the practical and intended results of that communication. And the real meaning in misleading those that are so easily misled is the buying of time, sympathy, and approval. All of which are currencies that the Trump administration can spend on their real goals—the attainment of political legacy and the enrichment of close groups and supporters through policies that are necessarily inflationary and wasteful.
The Nature of Government
To cut government spending is quite a simple idea. It requires no performance artists and no public relations campaign. Congressmen and private citizens alike have made countless suggestions over the years that could have been implemented. But they weren’t. That is because asking those in government power to cut costs is asking them to act against their own interest. That interest is not about putting America first, or draining the swamp, or making government more “efficient,” it is about a group of bureaucrats accruing and wielding political power at the expense of others.
When any politician—or their chosen crony—speaks in ways that stir the masses, it should be understood that such professed beliefs are not convictions, but instruments used in the pursuit of power. Those who value liberty should know this instinctively, and meet every political pronouncement with a simple, reflexive response: “I don’t believe you.”
