Trump has been busy in his first week, and I’ve been more pleased with his actions than I expected to be.

And if current rumors turn out to be true, then we might be in for a very interesting 4 years indeed:

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

If true, this would represent the single biggest suite of spending cuts ever witnessed anywhere. As The Hill reports, entire government programs would have to be axed, and a few entire departments would have to go too.

Incredibly, even this extra-ordinary slashing of spending still wouldn’t bring the budget into surplus!!! Oh it will ‘officially’, where the US budget deficit is ‘only’ about $540B USD. But the reality is that last year alone the US spent $1,400,000,000,000 USD more than it brought in, with more than half of that deficit not being reported in the budget.

In fact 5 of the last 7 years had US debt increases of more than $1T each:

Year

Gross Debt

Debt Increase

Federal Deficit

Other Borrow

2010	13529	1653	1294	359
2011	14764	1235	1300	-64
2012	16051	1287	1087	200
2013	16719	669	680	-11
2014	17795	1075	485	590
2015	18120	326	438	-113
2016	19537	1417	587	830

The key column there is ‘debt increase’, which is far in excess of the ‘Federal Deficit’, which is the number that is widely reported.

So:

• Trump looks like he might actually  take an axe to US government spending in a way we’ve never seen before… ever. Personally I’m surprised, I thought Trump would be a pure big spending Democrat once he had power, but maybe I was wrong.
• The squealing has already started as the fat piglets who have lived off the government teat for decades suddenly have to go and find food for themselves. Expect many apocalyptic scenarios to be predicted in the media and by bureaucrats as a consequence of these cuts… just like the apocalypse was predicted for the US ‘government shutdown’ and for the Brexit vote as well. If you don’t know about the ‘shutdown’, here’s my video from back when it happened:

• These cuts, as dramatic as they are, as unprecedented as they are, and as good a start as they are, won’t even stop the US from going deeper and deeper into debt every year.

And finally, and most importantly:

• Trump will have a lot of difficulty getting these spending cuts through the House and Senate, even though they are both held by Republicans. This should be a moment where a new direction for the US Federal Government is set, and the effects of this moment should ripple through the next 100 years as Americans rediscover that they can live without the Feds looking over their shoulders, that there doesn’t need to be a government program for absolutely everything… and stop piling up more and more debt onto their children and grand-children.

But it probably won’t be. Republicans are as much a part of the problem as Democrats are, the moment any of these politicians feel that these cuts are threatening their chances of re-election, they’ll ‘take a stand’ try and stop them.

I may have been wrong about Trump (at least on the spending side of things), and I hope I’m wrong about all the other politicians in the House and Senate. But if History is Prelude, I expect these cuts to be swallowed by Congress, never to be seen again, and for over $1T a year to continue to be loaded onto the next generation of Americans until it all comes crashing down.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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