Americans learned this past weekend that the Trump administration had fired more than 6,000 IRS agents. It was like Christmas in February! Keep going, Mr. President, because we’re still not tired!
Unfortunately, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has poured some major cold water on the whole process behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its effort to reduce government fraud and abuse of the taxpayers.
We have bad news to report and then we have even worse news to report about what we’ve all been referring to as the “DOGE cuts.” It’s a bad way to start a Monday for sure.
This is really awful. Sen. Rand Paul notes that even though highlighting the federal government’s many frauds is a good thing, it doesn’t stop the government from spending that money.
For the past several years around Christmas time/New Year’s, Sen. Paul has pointed out the government’s worst fraud, waste, and abuse and it never accomplishes anything, because Congress keeps appropriating ever larger amounts of money to the same federal agencies.
Let’s take those 6,000 fired IRS agents as an example. Because they’ve been fired by DOGE, you might think that the taxpayer money spent on their salaries just goes back to the Treasury Department. It doesn’t. It stays with the IRS because Congress already appropriated those funds.
The average first-year IRS employee earns a salary of more than $68,000. So, even though the agents are fired and the $408 million is not going to be spent on their salaries, the IRS just keeps the money and spends it on something else. DOGE has not actually “cut” anything at this point.
The same thing applies to the USAID fraud, the Department of Education fraud, the Treasury Department fraud, the Social Security fraud, and everything else that DOGE has exposed. Nothing has been cut and no taxpayer money has been saved at this point.
President Trump has the option to use a process called “budget impoundment” as a potential solution. He can “impound” the funds so that the IRS or whatever other agency cannot spend them. That still doesn’t send the taxpayers’ money back to the Treasury Department, however. It would only keep the money in limbo until another president comes along and “unfreezes” it, which would result in the cash going right back to the IRS.
It’s also an open legal question of whether President Trump would even be able to use impoundment. As Sen. Paul notes, Trump will immediately be challenged in court the second that Trump impounds even a nickel. It then becomes a question of which co-equal branch of the government has authority over the funds—the Congress that was evil and stupid enough to appropriate the money in the first place, or the president who is trying to save the taxpayers’ money.
It’s basically a coin toss over how the Supreme Court would rule on this. Nobody knows, and President Trump could lose if he takes that route.
According to Sen. Paul, the only way for the DOGE exposures to turn into actual spending cuts will require an act of Congress. While a spending cut package would easily make it through the House… well, you might want to brace yourself for this.
Rand Paul says that half of the Republicans in the US Senate do not want to cut federal spending, even with all the fraud, waste, and abuse that DOGE is exposing.
Talk about losing that Christmas-in-February feeling.
Senator Paul highlights a privileged tool that the US Senate has, which is called a rescission package. This is an established procedure that cannot be filibustered in the Senate, and it only requires a majority of 51 votes to pass it. Rescission would immediately claw back the savings from federal agencies and send it back to Treasury.
That would result in actual spending cuts. Right now, zero Democrats in the Senate will vote for spending cuts, regulatory cuts, or tax savings for Americans.
“On the Republican side, almost all would verbally tell you they’re for less debt, less spending, less taxes, et cetera,” says Sen. Paul. “But when push comes to shove, about half of Republicans are against less debt, less spending.”
We need to gird our loins for the battle that’s coming. If even four Republican Senators were opposed to the DOGE cuts—no matter how fraudulent every federal program turns out to be—those cuts can’t be implemented through rescission.
If 25 of them are opposed to the cuts, as Senator Paul says, then we’ve got a real problem on our hands. These cuts might never happen unless “we the people” start putting tremendous pressure on all Republican Senators.
Liked we said at the beginning, this isn’t great news. These DOGE savings aren’t savings…yet.
