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Elon Musk expects to allocate $2 trillion from the US budget. What is the impact on Florida?

Posted on by L. Dreeye
Elon Musk expects to allocate trillion from the US budget. What is the impact on Florida?

The comments come as Musk, one of the richest men on the planet, has played a major role in rallies and campaign events for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

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Media reports quote Elon Musk as saying he could cut the federal budget by $2 trillion, about 30%, from the more than $6 trillion federal budget, although this would lead to “temporary hardship” for Americans.

The comments come as Musk, one of the richest men on the planet, has played a major role in rallies and campaign events for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. In those appearances, Musk talked about a commission on “government efficiency” if Trump regains the presidency in the Nov. 5 election.

The commission’s goal will be to find federal spending that could be eliminated to reduce the annual deficit and ultimately reduce the U.S. national debt.

What do the numbers look like?

Currently, the US government is spending just over $7 trillion this fiscal year, according to national debt data. The total national debt has exceeded $35 trillion.

The top three budget items include Medicare ($1.8 trillion), Social Security ($1.4 trillion) and US defense and homeland security ($939 billion). Combined, these three countries account for approximately $4.1 trillion, almost two-thirds of the budget. The other two big expenses are interest on the debt ($981 billion) and the Department of Veterans Affairs ($333 billion).

You can check the US government debt clock for all the numbers at usdebtlock.org.

Where did the idea of ​​a “Committee on Government Effectiveness” come from?

Musk is a big name in Florida thanks to his Space X venture in Cape Canaveral. A close ally of Trump, he is now embroiled in a legal battle over his proposal to give away $1 million a day to a citizen who votes in a battleground state. On Thursday, October 31, he tried to transfer to the federal state. court.

The bid to overhaul government spending first came to the fore in August when Musk, who had already supported Trump’s candidacy, held a conversation with the former president on X, the online platform formerly known as Twitter.

During the conversation, Musk blamed the country’s inflationary spiral over the past three years on federal government spending by the Biden administration, even though the Trump administration also injected trillions of dollars into the debt in red ink.

But Trump said it was to blame for soaring energy prices due to the Biden administration’s policies. Then Musk proposed creating a commission to review federal budget expenditures.

“Sure, but back to this basic thing that people try to overcomplicate, but it’s not true: inflation is caused by government overspending. Do you agree that we need to look at government spending and create a government efficiency commission that will try to make spending reasonable? Does this mean the country lives within its means? Musk said.

Trump, however, showed little interest at the time and instead repeated his call to expand drilling to lower consumer goods costs.

But when Vice President Kamala Harris led Trump in the polls after the Sept. 4 debate, Musk became a much more prominent player on Trump’s team, and cutting the government budget became a much more discussed proposal.

What did Musk just say about “temporary difficulties”?

Musk said at Trump’s controversial Madison Square Garden rally that a federal spending panel could exclude “at least $2 trillion,” according to a report in The Washington Post.

He added that the goal, according to the report, is to “get the government off your back and out of your wallet.” He did not provide details about where the trillions in savings would come from.

Government budget analysts scoffed at Musk’s assertion.

“The idea that you can cut $2 trillion in wasteful and unnecessary programs is absolutely absurd,” Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank, told The Washington Post. “This fantasy has a long history. that one smart businessman will simply identify trillions of waste, but this is not true.”

Musk is far from the only figure on the political right pushing for deep cuts to the US budget.

National Republican leaders have long called for deep cuts to federal programs, and President Ronald Reagan initially called for eliminating Cabinet departments such as the Education Department. Currently, Project 2025, a far-right plan that Trump and his campaign rejected, also aims to radically cut federal spending.

Florida’s junior senator, Rick Scott, has been at the forefront of a plan to make massive cuts to national spending.

In the spring of 2022, he put forward a plan to force Congress to reauthorize every federal program every five years. If the Senate and House of Representatives do not reauthorize them, these programs and agencies will be “closed,” that is, eliminated.

Democrats in Florida’s Congress supported the proposal, saying it would jeopardize Social Security, Medicare, national defense and veterans’ affairs. President Joe Biden condemned the idea in his 2023 State of the Union Address.

Scott fiercely defended his proposal and said Biden was confused and lying about the plan. But he ultimately reconsidered a proposal to exclude entitlement programs, veterans’ benefits and homeland security and defense programs from the sunset provision.

How dependent is Florida on federal money?

Florida depends on federal dollars to meet its financial goals. The state’s current $116.5 billion budget includes $37.9 billion from Washington, according to one analysis.

Florida is said to be one of the states receiving the most federal aid, along with other populous states California, New York, Texas and Pennsylvania.

The state is home to about 4.8 million Social Security recipients, of whom 3.8 million are people age 65 or older. Just over 5 million people receive Medicare benefits.

There are 1.4 million veterans in the state, but not all receive care at Veterans Affairs hospitals, clinics and medical facilities.

Antonio Fins is the politics and business editor for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can contact him at [email protected]. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.