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U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

84 points by latchkey 2mo ago

latchkey 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/0NalV https://archive.ph/0NalV
rhelz 2mo ago
By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground. I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral, the electorate will be angry they don't have cake (unless the taxes are applied disproportionally to the top income and wealth percentiles), and we'll be right back to irresponsible policy. I don't have much hope for the US, but at least the bond market are the adults in the room currently. Congrats to those who strip mined the country successfully.
  - rvz 2mo ago
    > New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral That debt is never getting paid, I'm afraid.
    - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
      US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. It can be paid back, you just have to go after it. It's a choice not to. Forward curves go up because we choose to not reduce the debt? All consumer borrowing costs go up accordingly (consumer debt and mortgages are priced off of US treasuries)? A crisis occurs and there isn't any borrowing capacity left to get to the other side? Sucks to suck, try to suck less in the future. Natural consequences are an important component of the learning process. Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
    - rhelz 2mo ago
      I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses. I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds? Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that..... The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
- exabrial 2mo ago
  This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible. The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports. That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
    - 0xy 2mo ago
      [flagged]
    - rhelz 2mo ago
      The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees." When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff. That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
      - qzx_pierri 2mo ago
        [flagged]
        preg_match 2mo ago
        This isn't a refutation or even an argument. If something was obviously incorrect, you would think it would be trivial to prove wrong. But, evidently not. The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally. The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
- rvz 2mo ago
  This debt problem was long before Trump and this is why the US dollar is being printed straight to $0, until it loses its reserve currency status.
  - jambalaya8 2mo ago
    It really already did lose its reserve status, in a manner of speaking. There isn't ever going to be a gold standard again (even if there is, would the actual gold have the sort of real life uses it had when the gold standard was around? Not like people fill teeth with it anymore unless you are some sort of thug).
    - unrented7977 2mo ago
      Gold is a fantastically useful element. It's vastly more useful today as our knowledge and application of chemistry has improved. It's probably more in demand as a commodity today than it ever has been.
      - jambalaya8 2mo ago
        I hear platinum is the way to go. Or iron.
      - rhelz 2mo ago
        Gold is a useful element, for sure, but there's no where's near enough of it to serve as a reserve currency. E.G. the U.S. reserves are worth about $1.2 trillion (changes each day, of course). Compare that to a national economy which has a GDP of over $30 trillion. All these old gold bugs just can't wrap their heads around what exponential growth really looks like. But we can grow our productive capacity far, far faster than we can grow the supply of gold.
- adamredwoods 2mo ago
  I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
  - jleyank 2mo ago
    "Talk" and "Walk" aren't the same word although they rhyme. And they only refer to Democrats, who are the only ones with agency in government (Murc's Law).
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    When they engage in financial conservation it's cover for destroying programs they don't like. The fact that they are cheering on yet another incredibly stupid, expensive, and pointless war proves that they are not "fiscal conservatives."
  - nielsbot 2mo ago
    What they always really mean is tax cuts for those who need it least
- 0xy 2mo ago
  The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room. It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House. Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton. Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
  - Jtsummers 2mo ago
    The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.
  - rhelz 2mo ago
    How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different. But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom. No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
    - 0xy 2mo ago
      There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?
      - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2mo ago
        The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans. If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation. But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off. There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects. Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
- conartist6 2mo ago
  The challenge now is that we have to have a vision for what we want to build.
  - krapp 2mo ago
    Half the country does have such a vision, and they're getting exactly what they want. The question is why the other half can't seem to do shit about it.
    - conartist6 2mo ago
      The system as it works is made to cause partisan balance to stay close to the competitive 50/50 That may make it seem like nothing every changes, and much wind is spent on it. Real change is often so deep and slow that it just isn't even news. That's because politicians don't usually lead, they follow
- frogperson 2mo ago
  Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat. America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
  - qeternity 2mo ago
    It is still people, not money, who votes for them over and over again…
    - oth001 2mo ago
      Well when the choice is between two corrupt and/or bribed politicians...
      - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
        Agree, vote for the most wildly corrupt.
    - Timon3 2mo ago
      And the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections, combined with the media apparatus built up by the right. I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
      - otterley 2mo ago
        If money won elections, then the outcome of every election could be predicted with accuracy based solely on the relative spending by or on behalf of each candidate. In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost. Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results. Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
- blooalien 2mo ago
  > I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance. ^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
  - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
    Star Trek must have looked a little too DEI, and we all thought we were somehow going to be Immortan Joe…
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago
  "I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens." I'm with you, brother/sister.
bubbleRefuge 2mo ago
Federal gov deficit = private sector savings.
- nwellnhof 2mo ago
  Only in a closed economy.
  - bubbleRefuge 2mo ago
    Its an accounting identity
    - lkbm 2mo ago
      I don't think it is. A lot of federal government debt is held by other governments, not just private entities.
0xy 2mo ago
Unlimited spending will never cease as both parties are heavily incentivized to spend, pork barrel and defer desperately needed reform. Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
- jghn 2mo ago
  This is correct yet also obscures an important point. The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true. I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one who cuts the waste.
  - 0xy 2mo ago
    The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.
    - jghn 2mo ago
      I don't believe I said otherwise. And yet, your response doesn't at all touch on my other point.
    - solid_fuel 2mo ago
      You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy. This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
      - 0xy 2mo ago
        Biden's infra plan was $550bn in new spending, which was offset in only $50bn of new revenue and $110bn of spending reductions. So, on net, it was massively inflationary and toasted the budget. That was just one proposal with half a trillion.
rbanffy 2mo ago
I guess it’s time to elect a couple democrats to curb the deficit while solving the impending social collapse. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen this time.
- DoesntMatter22 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - epolanski 2mo ago
    Trump, 1st term, added 24% of GDP worth of debt. That's more or less the same number of Obama and Bush, but they served two terms each. In his second term, he's already added 11% in a record 19 months.
    - voxl 2mo ago
      Don't bother, Republicans are the only ones that care about the debt and their ideology makes them incapable of realizing there very choice of candidates is the exact problem
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - DoesntMatter22 2mo ago
      What's the difference? Everyone involved has been completely reckless with the debt. You think a democrat will somehow stop spending? Both parties are super happy to drive the car off the cliff
      - donohoe 2mo ago
        They just told you what the difference is.
bamboozled 2mo ago
This admin has done basically the opposite of everything it said it would do…who could’ve guessed?
- solid_fuel 2mo ago
  What? Basically everything they’ve done was laid out in project 2025. The people who voted for this were warned about exactly what has happened.
  - mikestew 2mo ago
    "Why u surprised, bro? Project 2025, duh!" meme needs to die, it's a lazy answer. You know full well what OP is talking about. Where's the $2 gasoline? Why does the debt keep going up with the party of fiscal restraint in charge? No more foreign wars, eh? Etc. There's nothing wrong with reminding folks what was said on the campaign stump.
    - CursedSilicon 2mo ago
      Why remind people of the lies? We all knew they were lies. And the people who believed the lies will not have their minds changed There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base
      - myvoiceismypass 2mo ago
        Nearly 50% (49.8) of all voters were either duped by the lies or totally okay with the lies (or some combo of both). Over 77 million Americans.
        IAmGraydon 2mo ago
        You've probably heard the saying "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." Well, it's true. And the good times have created many, many weak men. The next part is going to be here sooner than most think.
motbus3 2mo ago
I am ignorant. If they don't pay, who will charge it if the default?
- epolanski 2mo ago
  It's literally impossible to default as you can simply emit new money and buy back the debt or pay the interest with the minted money. Of course this comes with its own set of gigantic issues, likely triple digit inflation and hardship to raise money for generations. But US can't default really.
  - kotaKat 2mo ago
    > But US can't default really. It could. We'd just reorganize and call the old debts part of "Old US". This is all "New US".
    - pstuart 2mo ago
      And that New US Dollar as a global currency? Not likely.
  - partloyaldemon 2mo ago
    You’re the only one in the thread that gets any of this right. But: Monetizing the debt is replacing one asset (treasuries eg) that pays interest with a nominally equal asset that doesn’t (US dollar). How does that spur inflation? It’s a reduction in income over time. How does paying back our debt IN FULL hurt our credit worthiness?
    - SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
      Money is special because it’s the only asset that can be used to purchase goods and services. If I have a pile of 10 year Treasury bonds worth $500, and I want to buy a TV, I have to first convince someone with $500 in cash that they’d rather have my bonds than buy their own TV.
jambalaya8 2mo ago
Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.
- rowens794 2mo ago
  You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.
  - jambalaya8 2mo ago
    I don't actually. I paid the last of my monthly student loan payments off in 2013 when I was an ex-pat. The rest had long ago fell off my credit report. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places. I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008. Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago
  I'm happy for you, but suspect the "Everything is Fine" meme could have substituted for your comment. The ebbing tide will lower all ships…
  - jambalaya8 2mo ago
    I fully know this. But someday if the dystopic bounty hunters come to me for a chunk of that distressingly ludicrous national debt, I can at least annoy them.
oivaksef 2mo ago
They need to cut your taxes and raise everyone elses. The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice.
- blooalien 2mo ago
  > The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice. Infinitely more credible than either of our current parties at this point.
- Gud 2mo ago
  What the USA needs is more decentralisation and direct democracy. Why has the federal state accumulated $40T debt?
  - myrmidon 2mo ago
    Because it is politically much easier to just spend on medicare, social security and military than it is to raise taxes to cover that spending? Interest on debt is already a double-digit percentage of spending, so the problem gets worse by itself. And honestly: How many people in the US would actually change party only because of irresponsible spending? In my view, this is like priority number 4 at best for most people, and many at most moan about it instead of letting it drive their political choices. Political representatives also basically only ever throw it around as accusation against opponents, without ever actually doing better themselves (just consider the Trump-1 promise of getting rid of the debt during his first term: not even an attempt was made).
    - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
      > this is like priority number 4 at best for most people… No surprise, they're (we're) humans after all. When the shit hits the fan with The Great Depression II, we'll reset our priorities then.
  - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
    Direct democracy is exactly how you get fiscal policy of wracking up massive debt. Voters will never choose to balance the budget
lokar 2mo ago
The media should report the number that actually matters: debt to GDP ratio. It’s quite high as well, but it’s the more meaningful number.
- croon 2mo ago
  And yet more meaningful than that is what the debt increase is spent on. If it's infrastructure/education/etc, productivity/population welfare will rise over time. If it's debt through tax cuts, temporary productivity might be argued (some of the GDP here), but the nation will be in decline.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
skeledrew 2mo ago
And who's going to hold the US responsible for repayment? Way I see it, US has the power to just tell any creditor that they won't be repaying, whether through structuring it as some economic package or just straight up saying go suck it. The former's been done before (1933); maybe eventually we'll see the latter, if a nation has the balls to ask. And talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- DANmode 2mo ago
  > talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool. Until the pool runs out of funding to do to replace the evaporated water.
  - skeledrew 2mo ago
    It'll never run since they have the power to demand that it be kept sufficiently full.
    - Tadpole9181 2mo ago
      Are we living in the same reality? The US can't even keep a single strait safe right now against a fairly "weak" state. We don't have the political willpower for American servicemen to die in defensive wars like Ukraine or to hold back ISIS in Afghanistan. How, exactly, are we going to demand sovereignties like China or the EU give us trillions of dollars?
      - 6510 2mo ago
        foreign gov treasury holdings are only some 9% (mostly Japan, UK, China, Belgium and Canada) As a serious country you can just keep servicing the bonds with bonds. If the government is... well.... it starts to look more like one of those poker websites where you cant cash out? The world is full of similar but poorly organized ..., trump is doing one hell of a job uniting them. It seems a lot like that outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I combine some "hallucinated" numbers into a table here https://chat.deepseek.com/share/bzam2y198qps3l2z4x https://chat.deepseek.com/share/bzam2y198qps3l2z4x
odyssey7 2mo ago
What if we viewed national debt like CPI? It’s not that it’s ridiculously higher now, it’s that money works differently now. What used do seem implausible is now accepted as normal, and tough luck if your income and wealth fell behind / didn’t keep pace.
- andriy_koval 2mo ago
  the scary part is how much they spend from budget to service debt and pay interests
TitaRusell 2mo ago
And they spent it all on healthcare, public housing and high speed rail right?
- tim333 2mo ago
  Some's going on sensible things like returning steam catapults to aircraft carriers.
  - krapp 2mo ago
    And the Epstein Memorial Ballroom.
- webninja 2mo ago
  Sure, I heard it was all spent on childless daycares in Minneapolis.
- johncearls 1mo ago
  If you look at the debt-to-GDP ratios and identify the spikes, you will see there were two recent(ish) events that overwhelmingly inflated the debt. 1) 2008 housing crash. Bailing out Wall Street was expensive. 2) Covid-related spending (2020-2022). The interesting thing is that both occurred during transitions in the party of the president, with unchanged policies no matter who gained power. Contrary to the my side did it, no your side did it, blame game that always accompanies these sort of stories. As usual, George Carlin was right. "It's a big club and you ain't in it."
thelastgallon 2mo ago
> Ten years ago, the debt level was at $19.4 trillion. $80 trillion if it doubles again in 10 years.
- H4cks0r1337 2mo ago
  That's not how debt works. It would be way more than $80 trillion.
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
brought to you by the "party of fiscal responsibility"
- HDThoreaun 2mo ago
  And democrats were the party of slavery, these things change since there are only 2 parties in the country
  - insane_dreamer 2mo ago
    what does that have to do with it? the GOP is _still_ proclaiming itself to be the party of fiscal responsibility
    - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
      Not really. It’s proclaiming itself to be the party of right populists that also does tax cuts for the rich in exchange for donations/corruption
pickleglitch 2mo ago
I feel like the media is anticipating a new Democrat controlled congress, and so they are starting to bang on the national debt panic drum in preparation. Not that the debt isn't a problem, and $40T is certainly a milestone, but if the dems do somehow get back in power I'd bet $40T that we will all be treated to endless op-eds about how we have to do austerity because the debt is out of control. The military will still get it's $1.5T+ budget tho. There's always enough money for more bombs.
- webninja 2mo ago
  It's starting to feel hopeless. A decade of party rotations and this issue still exists. The fiscally liberal will spend and the fiscally conservative aren't being fiscally conservative. How come we no longer hear about DOGE? How long until 20% of all tax revenue goes just to interest on the debt?
  - krapp 2mo ago
    >How come we no longer hear about DOGE? DOGE was an obvious farce that defunded and destroyed necessary programs on a purely ideological basis[0], intimidated government employees[1], created far more tax waste than it ever found, much less claimed[2,3] disrupted legitimate government functions by firing necessary employees who needed to be rehired[4], exfiltrated an unknown amount of private data to Palantir and who knows who else[5,6], and then after permanent damage to the government was done, was closed[7]. It's mission is complete, there's nothing more to hear about them. I'm sorry if you ever thought DOGE had anything to do with an honest, good-faith effort to reduce government waste. If so, you were lied to. Its purpose was to purge the government of ideological enemies, protect Elon Musk's business interests[8] and lay the groundwork for the transition to authoritarianism. [0]https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-political-ideology-than-real-cost-savings-so-far-2025-02-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi... [1]https://www.salon.com/2025/02/06/musks-doge-operation-sued-over-effort-to-intimidate-and-threaten-department-of-labor-employees/ https://www.salon.com/2025/02/06/musks-doge-operation-sued-o... [2]https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/31/2025/the-217-billion-blunder-new-psi-report-reveals-billions-in-taxpayer-dollars-squandered-by-doge https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/... [3]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-elon-musk-government-accountability-office/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-elon-musk... [4]https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-gsa-fired-employees-ce18553b281fbf5816ec2fd491d79b78 https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-gsa-fired-employe... [5]https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-surveil-track/ https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-s... [6]https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/the-independent-whistleblower-claims-doge-compromised-social-security-data-of-hundreds-of-millions-of-americans/ https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/the-independent-whistl... [7]https://www.nffe.org/press-release/doge-fails-and-shutters-yet-permanent-damage-to-government-institutions-and-federal-workforce-remains/ https://www.nffe.org/press-release/doge-fails-and-shutters-y... [8]https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-doge-cfpb https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-dog... I mean it was named after a 4chan shitposting meme, why did anyone take it at face value to begin with?
hirvi74 2mo ago
Empty yee coffers, peasants. The king demands it!

84 points by latchkey 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/0NalV https://archive.ph/0NalV

rhelz 2mo ago

By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground. I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.

toomuchtodo 2mo ago
New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral, the electorate will be angry they don't have cake (unless the taxes are applied disproportionally to the top income and wealth percentiles), and we'll be right back to irresponsible policy. I don't have much hope for the US, but at least the bond market are the adults in the room currently. Congrats to those who strip mined the country successfully.
- rvz 2mo ago
  > New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral That debt is never getting paid, I'm afraid.
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. It can be paid back, you just have to go after it. It's a choice not to. Forward curves go up because we choose to not reduce the debt? All consumer borrowing costs go up accordingly (consumer debt and mortgages are priced off of US treasuries)? A crisis occurs and there isn't any borrowing capacity left to get to the other side? Sucks to suck, try to suck less in the future. Natural consequences are an important component of the learning process. Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
  - rhelz 2mo ago
    I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses. I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds? Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that..... The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
exabrial 2mo ago
This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible. The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
- pstuart 2mo ago
  I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports. That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
  - 0xy 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - rhelz 2mo ago
    The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees." When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff. That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
    - qzx_pierri 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      - preg_match 2mo ago
        This isn't a refutation or even an argument. If something was obviously incorrect, you would think it would be trivial to prove wrong. But, evidently not. The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally. The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
rvz 2mo ago
This debt problem was long before Trump and this is why the US dollar is being printed straight to $0, until it loses its reserve currency status.
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  It really already did lose its reserve status, in a manner of speaking. There isn't ever going to be a gold standard again (even if there is, would the actual gold have the sort of real life uses it had when the gold standard was around? Not like people fill teeth with it anymore unless you are some sort of thug).
  - unrented7977 2mo ago
    Gold is a fantastically useful element. It's vastly more useful today as our knowledge and application of chemistry has improved. It's probably more in demand as a commodity today than it ever has been.
    - jambalaya8 2mo ago
      I hear platinum is the way to go. Or iron.
    - rhelz 2mo ago
      Gold is a useful element, for sure, but there's no where's near enough of it to serve as a reserve currency. E.G. the U.S. reserves are worth about $1.2 trillion (changes each day, of course). Compare that to a national economy which has a GDP of over $30 trillion. All these old gold bugs just can't wrap their heads around what exponential growth really looks like. But we can grow our productive capacity far, far faster than we can grow the supply of gold.
adamredwoods 2mo ago
I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
- jleyank 2mo ago
  "Talk" and "Walk" aren't the same word although they rhyme. And they only refer to Democrats, who are the only ones with agency in government (Murc's Law).
- pstuart 2mo ago
  When they engage in financial conservation it's cover for destroying programs they don't like. The fact that they are cheering on yet another incredibly stupid, expensive, and pointless war proves that they are not "fiscal conservatives."
- nielsbot 2mo ago
  What they always really mean is tax cuts for those who need it least
0xy 2mo ago
The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room. It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House. Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton. Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
- Jtsummers 2mo ago
  The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.
- rhelz 2mo ago
  How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different. But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom. No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
  - 0xy 2mo ago
    There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2mo ago
      The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans. If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation. But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off. There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects. Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
conartist6 2mo ago
The challenge now is that we have to have a vision for what we want to build.
- krapp 2mo ago
  Half the country does have such a vision, and they're getting exactly what they want. The question is why the other half can't seem to do shit about it.
  - conartist6 2mo ago
    The system as it works is made to cause partisan balance to stay close to the competitive 50/50 That may make it seem like nothing every changes, and much wind is spent on it. Real change is often so deep and slow that it just isn't even news. That's because politicians don't usually lead, they follow
frogperson 2mo ago
Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat. America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
- qeternity 2mo ago
  It is still people, not money, who votes for them over and over again…
  - oth001 2mo ago
    Well when the choice is between two corrupt and/or bribed politicians...
    - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
      Agree, vote for the most wildly corrupt.
  - Timon3 2mo ago
    And the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections, combined with the media apparatus built up by the right. I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
    - otterley 2mo ago
      If money won elections, then the outcome of every election could be predicted with accuracy based solely on the relative spending by or on behalf of each candidate. In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost. Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results. Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
blooalien 2mo ago
> I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance. ^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago
  Star Trek must have looked a little too DEI, and we all thought we were somehow going to be Immortan Joe…
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
"I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens." I'm with you, brother/sister.

bubbleRefuge 2mo ago

Federal gov deficit = private sector savings.

nwellnhof 2mo ago
Only in a closed economy.
- bubbleRefuge 2mo ago
  Its an accounting identity
  - lkbm 2mo ago
    I don't think it is. A lot of federal government debt is held by other governments, not just private entities.

0xy 2mo ago

Unlimited spending will never cease as both parties are heavily incentivized to spend, pork barrel and defer desperately needed reform. Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.

jghn 2mo ago
This is correct yet also obscures an important point. The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true. I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one who cuts the waste.
- 0xy 2mo ago
  The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.
  - jghn 2mo ago
    I don't believe I said otherwise. And yet, your response doesn't at all touch on my other point.
  - solid_fuel 2mo ago
    You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy. This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
    - 0xy 2mo ago
      Biden's infra plan was $550bn in new spending, which was offset in only $50bn of new revenue and $110bn of spending reductions. So, on net, it was massively inflationary and toasted the budget. That was just one proposal with half a trillion.

rbanffy 2mo ago

I guess it’s time to elect a couple democrats to curb the deficit while solving the impending social collapse. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen this time.

DoesntMatter22 2mo ago
[flagged]
- epolanski 2mo ago
  Trump, 1st term, added 24% of GDP worth of debt. That's more or less the same number of Obama and Bush, but they served two terms each. In his second term, he's already added 11% in a record 19 months.
  - voxl 2mo ago
    Don't bother, Republicans are the only ones that care about the debt and their ideology makes them incapable of realizing there very choice of candidates is the exact problem
    - deleted 2mo ago
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  - deleted 2mo ago
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  - DoesntMatter22 2mo ago
    What's the difference? Everyone involved has been completely reckless with the debt. You think a democrat will somehow stop spending? Both parties are super happy to drive the car off the cliff
    - donohoe 2mo ago
      They just told you what the difference is.

bamboozled 2mo ago

This admin has done basically the opposite of everything it said it would do…who could’ve guessed?

solid_fuel 2mo ago
What? Basically everything they’ve done was laid out in project 2025. The people who voted for this were warned about exactly what has happened.
- mikestew 2mo ago
  "Why u surprised, bro? Project 2025, duh!" meme needs to die, it's a lazy answer. You know full well what OP is talking about. Where's the $2 gasoline? Why does the debt keep going up with the party of fiscal restraint in charge? No more foreign wars, eh? Etc. There's nothing wrong with reminding folks what was said on the campaign stump.
  - CursedSilicon 2mo ago
    Why remind people of the lies? We all knew they were lies. And the people who believed the lies will not have their minds changed There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base
    - myvoiceismypass 2mo ago
      Nearly 50% (49.8) of all voters were either duped by the lies or totally okay with the lies (or some combo of both). Over 77 million Americans.
      - IAmGraydon 2mo ago
        You've probably heard the saying "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." Well, it's true. And the good times have created many, many weak men. The next part is going to be here sooner than most think.

motbus3 2mo ago

I am ignorant. If they don't pay, who will charge it if the default?

epolanski 2mo ago
It's literally impossible to default as you can simply emit new money and buy back the debt or pay the interest with the minted money. Of course this comes with its own set of gigantic issues, likely triple digit inflation and hardship to raise money for generations. But US can't default really.
- kotaKat 2mo ago
  > But US can't default really. It could. We'd just reorganize and call the old debts part of "Old US". This is all "New US".
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    And that New US Dollar as a global currency? Not likely.
- partloyaldemon 2mo ago
  You’re the only one in the thread that gets any of this right. But: Monetizing the debt is replacing one asset (treasuries eg) that pays interest with a nominally equal asset that doesn’t (US dollar). How does that spur inflation? It’s a reduction in income over time. How does paying back our debt IN FULL hurt our credit worthiness?
  - SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
    Money is special because it’s the only asset that can be used to purchase goods and services. If I have a pile of 10 year Treasury bonds worth $500, and I want to buy a TV, I have to first convince someone with $500 in cash that they’d rather have my bonds than buy their own TV.

jambalaya8 2mo ago

Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.

rowens794 2mo ago
You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  I don't actually. I paid the last of my monthly student loan payments off in 2013 when I was an ex-pat. The rest had long ago fell off my credit report. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places. I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008. Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
I'm happy for you, but suspect the "Everything is Fine" meme could have substituted for your comment. The ebbing tide will lower all ships…
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  I fully know this. But someday if the dystopic bounty hunters come to me for a chunk of that distressingly ludicrous national debt, I can at least annoy them.

oivaksef 2mo ago

They need to cut your taxes and raise everyone elses. The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice.

blooalien 2mo ago
> The US needs the binface party as a credible 3rd choice. Infinitely more credible than either of our current parties at this point.
Gud 2mo ago
What the USA needs is more decentralisation and direct democracy. Why has the federal state accumulated $40T debt?
- myrmidon 2mo ago
  Because it is politically much easier to just spend on medicare, social security and military than it is to raise taxes to cover that spending? Interest on debt is already a double-digit percentage of spending, so the problem gets worse by itself. And honestly: How many people in the US would actually change party only because of irresponsible spending? In my view, this is like priority number 4 at best for most people, and many at most moan about it instead of letting it drive their political choices. Political representatives also basically only ever throw it around as accusation against opponents, without ever actually doing better themselves (just consider the Trump-1 promise of getting rid of the debt during his first term: not even an attempt was made).
  - JKCalhoun 2mo ago
    > this is like priority number 4 at best for most people… No surprise, they're (we're) humans after all. When the shit hits the fan with The Great Depression II, we'll reset our priorities then.
- HDThoreaun 2mo ago
  Direct democracy is exactly how you get fiscal policy of wracking up massive debt. Voters will never choose to balance the budget

lokar 2mo ago

The media should report the number that actually matters: debt to GDP ratio. It’s quite high as well, but it’s the more meaningful number.

croon 2mo ago
And yet more meaningful than that is what the debt increase is spent on. If it's infrastructure/education/etc, productivity/population welfare will rise over time. If it's debt through tax cuts, temporary productivity might be argued (some of the GDP here), but the nation will be in decline.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

skeledrew 2mo ago

And who's going to hold the US responsible for repayment? Way I see it, US has the power to just tell any creditor that they won't be repaying, whether through structuring it as some economic package or just straight up saying go suck it. The former's been done before (1933); maybe eventually we'll see the latter, if a nation has the balls to ask. And talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
DANmode 2mo ago
> talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool. Until the pool runs out of funding to do to replace the evaporated water.
- skeledrew 2mo ago
  It'll never run since they have the power to demand that it be kept sufficiently full.
  - Tadpole9181 2mo ago
    Are we living in the same reality? The US can't even keep a single strait safe right now against a fairly "weak" state. We don't have the political willpower for American servicemen to die in defensive wars like Ukraine or to hold back ISIS in Afghanistan. How, exactly, are we going to demand sovereignties like China or the EU give us trillions of dollars?
    - 6510 2mo ago
      foreign gov treasury holdings are only some 9% (mostly Japan, UK, China, Belgium and Canada) As a serious country you can just keep servicing the bonds with bonds. If the government is... well.... it starts to look more like one of those poker websites where you cant cash out? The world is full of similar but poorly organized ..., trump is doing one hell of a job uniting them. It seems a lot like that outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I combine some "hallucinated" numbers into a table here https://chat.deepseek.com/share/bzam2y198qps3l2z4x https://chat.deepseek.com/share/bzam2y198qps3l2z4x

odyssey7 2mo ago

What if we viewed national debt like CPI? It’s not that it’s ridiculously higher now, it’s that money works differently now. What used do seem implausible is now accepted as normal, and tough luck if your income and wealth fell behind / didn’t keep pace.

andriy_koval 2mo ago
the scary part is how much they spend from budget to service debt and pay interests

TitaRusell 2mo ago

And they spent it all on healthcare, public housing and high speed rail right?

tim333 2mo ago
Some's going on sensible things like returning steam catapults to aircraft carriers.
- krapp 2mo ago
  And the Epstein Memorial Ballroom.
webninja 2mo ago
Sure, I heard it was all spent on childless daycares in Minneapolis.
johncearls 1mo ago
If you look at the debt-to-GDP ratios and identify the spikes, you will see there were two recent(ish) events that overwhelmingly inflated the debt. 1) 2008 housing crash. Bailing out Wall Street was expensive. 2) Covid-related spending (2020-2022). The interesting thing is that both occurred during transitions in the party of the president, with unchanged policies no matter who gained power. Contrary to the my side did it, no your side did it, blame game that always accompanies these sort of stories. As usual, George Carlin was right. "It's a big club and you ain't in it."

thelastgallon 2mo ago

> Ten years ago, the debt level was at $19.4 trillion. $80 trillion if it doubles again in 10 years.

H4cks0r1337 2mo ago
That's not how debt works. It would be way more than $80 trillion.

insane_dreamer 2mo ago

brought to you by the "party of fiscal responsibility"

HDThoreaun 2mo ago
And democrats were the party of slavery, these things change since there are only 2 parties in the country
- insane_dreamer 2mo ago
  what does that have to do with it? the GOP is _still_ proclaiming itself to be the party of fiscal responsibility
  - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
    Not really. It’s proclaiming itself to be the party of right populists that also does tax cuts for the rich in exchange for donations/corruption

pickleglitch 2mo ago

I feel like the media is anticipating a new Democrat controlled congress, and so they are starting to bang on the national debt panic drum in preparation. Not that the debt isn't a problem, and $40T is certainly a milestone, but if the dems do somehow get back in power I'd bet $40T that we will all be treated to endless op-eds about how we have to do austerity because the debt is out of control. The military will still get it's $1.5T+ budget tho. There's always enough money for more bombs.

webninja 2mo ago
It's starting to feel hopeless. A decade of party rotations and this issue still exists. The fiscally liberal will spend and the fiscally conservative aren't being fiscally conservative. How come we no longer hear about DOGE? How long until 20% of all tax revenue goes just to interest on the debt?
- krapp 2mo ago
  >How come we no longer hear about DOGE? DOGE was an obvious farce that defunded and destroyed necessary programs on a purely ideological basis[0], intimidated government employees[1], created far more tax waste than it ever found, much less claimed[2,3] disrupted legitimate government functions by firing necessary employees who needed to be rehired[4], exfiltrated an unknown amount of private data to Palantir and who knows who else[5,6], and then after permanent damage to the government was done, was closed[7]. It's mission is complete, there's nothing more to hear about them. I'm sorry if you ever thought DOGE had anything to do with an honest, good-faith effort to reduce government waste. If so, you were lied to. Its purpose was to purge the government of ideological enemies, protect Elon Musk's business interests[8] and lay the groundwork for the transition to authoritarianism. [0]https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-political-ideology-than-real-cost-savings-so-far-2025-02-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi... [1]https://www.salon.com/2025/02/06/musks-doge-operation-sued-over-effort-to-intimidate-and-threaten-department-of-labor-employees/ https://www.salon.com/2025/02/06/musks-doge-operation-sued-o... [2]https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/31/2025/the-217-billion-blunder-new-psi-report-reveals-billions-in-taxpayer-dollars-squandered-by-doge https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/... [3]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-elon-musk-government-accountability-office/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-elon-musk... [4]https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-gsa-fired-employees-ce18553b281fbf5816ec2fd491d79b78 https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-gsa-fired-employe... [5]https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-surveil-track/ https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-s... [6]https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/the-independent-whistleblower-claims-doge-compromised-social-security-data-of-hundreds-of-millions-of-americans/ https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/the-independent-whistl... [7]https://www.nffe.org/press-release/doge-fails-and-shutters-yet-permanent-damage-to-government-institutions-and-federal-workforce-remains/ https://www.nffe.org/press-release/doge-fails-and-shutters-y... [8]https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-doge-cfpb https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-dog... I mean it was named after a 4chan shitposting meme, why did anyone take it at face value to begin with?

hirvi74 2mo ago

Empty yee coffers, peasants. The king demands it!