Mengapa Elon Musk tidak mendekati menemukan $ 1 triliun dalam pemotongan

Cutting $1 trillion from that part of the budget would eliminate that category of spending entirely — including nearly every nondefense government worker, most of the veterans health care system and all spending on medical research from the National Institutes of Health. And he’d still be short.

“Cutting a trillion in spending is not just rooting out waste, fraud and abuse,” said Zack Moller, the director of the economic program at Third Way, a center-left research group. “It is a fundamental rethinking of the role of government in the United States.”

By executive order, Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is limited to cutting this part of the budget, with exclusions for immigration enforcement and public safety.

What if cuts to other areas were on the table?

The entire federal budget, of course, is much larger than $1 trillion. But a combination of political priorities and legal impediments means Mr. Musk and his team have left major categories of government spending largely untouched so far.

Mr. Musk’s precise plans are hard to determine based on his limited statements at the cabinet meeting. The DOGE team did not respond to questions sent in a direct message on X, its preferred means of communication. The White House also declined to answer detailed questions about the target, though a spokesman told The New York Times on Thursday that $1 trillion remained “the goal.”

The military would perhaps be the easiest place to look for cuts. It is a large source of spending, its leadership has said there is fat to trim, and the main levers for savings — canceling contracts and grants, and firing government workers — are similar to those Mr. Musk’s team has used already.

But President Trump has not seemed interested in cutting military spending. His executive order establishing Mr. Musk’s office cordons it off from cuts. Although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has applauded Mr. Musk for finding some overspending, he said he planned to reallocate the money. The White House has also endorsed a recent budget resolution that would increase the military’s budget.

Republicans in Congress are considering cuts to another category of federal spending, which pays for anti-poverty programs like Medicaid, food assistance and income-based student loan plans. The budget resolution that passed the House last week would allow cuts to this part of the budget, although the specifics remain unclear. So far, Mr. Musk has not made major changes to those programs, which would probably fall under an exclusion of DOGE’s jurisdiction for “direct assistance to individuals.”

But some of the biggest parts of the budget have been even more clearly placed off limits. Mr. Trump has vowed repeatedly not to touch Social Security or Medicare, two of the largest categories of federal spending. While Mr. Musk has made some changes to the staffing of those programs, and says he hopes to root out fraud there, he has not changed the underlying benefit structure, where the vast majority of the spending occurs.

“There’s no way” Mr. Musk could find $1 trillion by cutting the programs he’s been told to cut, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is now president of the American Action Forum, a center-right economic policy group. “That’s just completely implausible, because he can’t touch mandatory spending, and that’s where all the money is.”

Mr. Holtz-Eakin noted that even if the Trump administration pursued equal cuts to all parts of the budget, a $1 trillion reduction in one year would be extremely abrupt and disruptive.

There is one more large category of spending that Mr. Musk can’t do much about (and is not shown on our charts). Interest payments on the federal debt are projected to cost upward of $1 trillion next year — more than what the government will spend on Medicare or the military. Even very large spending cuts will not make a meaningful dent in those existing interest obligations in a single year. Rising bond yields — also largely outside of Mr. Musk’s control — will also make a difference.

Mr. Musk’s recently cited estimate for next year — $150 billion — lines up with the DOGE website’s estimate of how much savings it has already achieved. But that number does not appear to be reliable. Though Mr. Musk’s group does not itemize all of its savings in detail, the parts of its website that do identify specific cuts have been riddled with errors, double-counting and other large inaccuracies.