(So is Trump serious about fixing our problem? DaJury is out! - CL)
The politicians who run the GOP on Capitol Hill are about ready to rug-pull Elon Musk and his patron in the Oval Office big time. That is, the so-called “clean CR [continuing resolution]” that Speaker Johnson is apparently cooking up will ratify the entirety of the runaway spending in the last Biden budget, thereby cancelling virtually every single dime that the DOGE operation has purportedly saved.
This awful outlook, of course, is a consequence of the stacked institutional mechanics that Elon Musk is just beginning to grasp.
For example, the appropriations authority for every one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of idiotic foreign aid contracts that DOGE has exposed and cancelled must by law be recycled and respent on another contract. And therefore spent on projects perhaps only slightly less stupid but in any case no less unaffordable.
The Great Money Bubble...Stockman, David A.Best Price: $2.23Buy New $8.00(as of 07:46 UTC - Details)
We are referring to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the passel of UniParty-appointed Federal district judges waiting to pounce in favor of lawsuits claiming funds are being illegally withheld by the executive.
To be sure, the anti-impoundment provisions of the 1974 Act are inconvenient albeit probably consistent with the black letters of the Constitution that delegate the power of the purse to Congress. But fortunately, there is a pretty creative hack that might be the next best thing to the now proscribed impoundment tool that Richard Nixon overused, thereby triggering the rebuke to presidential discretion embodied in the 1974 Act.
To wit, as Elon Musk apparently discovered earlier this week the Congressional rescission tool is a pretty good workaround to unspend money that has already been appropriated. This method of cutting existing spending authority does require Congressional approval within 45 days, but rescissions are subject to an up-or-down vote and no filibuster in the Senate.
So what the DOGE team needs to do right now is bundle up a massive pile of rescissions and send them to Capitol Hill to be voted upon as a pre-condition to consideration of the next CR.
We think there is enough fraud, waste, and abuse lying around, in fact, that a $300 billion rescission package could be sent to the Hill within the next week, which might well become known as “The Mother of All Rescissions”(MOAR)!
The proposition would be simple. Either pass MOAR or shut down the government when the current CR expires on March 14th. You choose. And keep it closed until the $300 billion of savings are approved by both Houses and signed by President Trump.
Moreover, to add stiffening to backbones on Capitol Hill, a “nay” vote on MOAR should carry an expectation of being primaried in 2026 on the GOP side of the aisle or being targeted for all-out attack on the Dem side among incumbents in districts/states that returned strong Trump majorities in 2024.
With interest expense having crossed the $1 trillion per year mark and rising rapidly, the nation’s fiscal accounts are now on the verge of plunging into a doom loop. That is to say, a cycle of rising Treasury yields, rising interest expense, and accelerating growth of the public debt that feeds back upon itself.......
......Yet here’s the thing: Real median household income only grew by 10% during that eight-year period. So what the DOGE team and their allies in the House Freedom Caucus should be shouting to the rafters is why in the hell should govenrment bureaucracies be getting a raise nearly twice as large as Main Street America has experienced since 2016?
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/03/david-stockman/its-rescission-time/ | The politicians who run the GOP on Capitol Hill are about ready to rug-pull Elon Musk and his patron in the Oval Office big time. That is, the so-called “clean CR [continuing resolution]” that Speaker Johnson is apparently cooking up will ratify the entirety of the runaway spending in the last Biden budget, thereby cancelling virtually every single dime that the DOGE operation has ... www.lewrockwell.com |
With interest expense having crossed the $1 trillion per year mark and rising rapidly, the nation’s fiscal accounts are now on the verge of plunging into a doom loop. That is to say, a cycle of rising Treasury yields, rising interest expense, and accelerating growth of the public debt that feeds back upon itself.
For instance, just since the end of FY 2024 on September 30th, the public debt has risen by nearly $850 billion, which amounts to $5.5 billion of new borrowing per day, including weekends, holidays, and snow days. So if the cycle is not broken soon, it will become beyond repair—especially if the impending tariff wars lead to an economic upheaval, which is entirely likely.
So in summary, here are the elements from which a $300 billion MOAR package could be assembled. It should be cautioned, however, that even something this big would be merely a down payment on the $2 trillion of annual deficit reductions actually needed, and not all of it would reduce cash outlays and borrowing immediately. That’s because, as will be explained in Part 2, some of the rescission amounts are for unobligated appropriations that might otherwise expire unused.
Still, the MOAR would amount to the crossing of the Fiscal Rubicon. If the Trump/DOGE forces can show that Congress can be compelled to walk the plank on real, material spending cuts, the remaining herculean tasks—sweeping reform of entitlement and drastic downsizing of the War Machine—will be far easier to accomplish.
