Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the new Department of Government Efficiency should help President reelect Donald J. Trump implement a straightforward reform: Return federal spending to 2019 levels.
Americans lived large just before COVID-19. On New Year’s Eve 2019—nearly five years ago—the U.S. economy boomed.
Real annual gross domestic product grew by 2.5%. Unemployment was just 3.5% and at or near record depths for blacks, Hispanics, and Americans of Asian descent. Female joblessness was at its lowest point since Eisenhower was president.
The economy blossomed amid robust federal spending that totaled $5.46 trillion. Uncle Sam was no aloof skinflint back then. Paring Washington’s activities to that pace again will not starve babies or steer seniors into the streets.
So, as 2025 beckons, America should restore the budget threshold that prevailed before the China virus ruined everything. It sandbagged the economy, sickened seemingly everyone, and—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported—between Jan. 11, 2020, and Dec. 14, 2024, it killed 1,213,622 Americans.
These microbes (most likely from the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Institute of Virology) also triggered some $2.48 trillion in emergency spending to relieve a quarantined national workforce, support padlocked employers, underwrite medical assistance, finance vaccine research, and otherwise shake the disease that gripped America and pounded the globe.
This once-in-a-century calamity guaranteed Big Government. Especially after it crippled the private sector, such federal activity and expenditures were unsurprising and not entirely unjustified.
The superb news is that COVID-19 has become an unremarkable flu. Its 2020 death toll of 367,209 under Trump rose to 469,966 under Biden in 2021 before falling to 255,673 in 2022, 75,580 in 2023, and 45,194 this year.
Alas, even today, a few too many bitter clingers still signal their twisted virtue by wearing masks. Resembling Donald Duck must give them a rush of moral superiority over us Great Unwashed. Aside from this extremely irritating reminder of the recent unpleasantness, COVID-19 has vanished into the history books.
So, too, should the tidal wave of pandemic-related government spending. It stubbornly refuses to recede into the sea.
Typical Washington: Today’s budget ceiling becomes tomorrow’s budget floor. Year One’s fiscal extravagance swiftly devolves into Year Two’s Scrooge-like federal parsimony.
This institutional profligacy goes by the highly arousing technical term of “continuing services budgeting.” (Pause now, if you must, for a cold shower.) This practice fuels heavy spending.
Fiscal year 2019’s total federal outlays were $5.46 trillion. The next year, costs related to COVID-19 ballooned that figure to $7.94 trillion—up 45.4%. Biden secured the White House in November 2020 and spent $7.84 trillion in fiscal 2021. Although post-COVID government spending slipped to $6.67 trillion in fiscal 2022 and $6.31 trillion in fiscal 2023, total federal spending still outpaces pre-COVID disbursements.
Among countless necessary improvements, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, should chant the equally sexy term “zero-based budgeting.” (If necessary, briefly think about baseball.)
Simply put: Federal agencies no longer would ladle fresh gravy atop their previous year’s budgets. Instead, every Cabinet secretary and agency administrator would have to justify to Congress every annual expenditure—from Dollar One.
DOGE should slash overall spending from fiscal 2024’s $6.75 trillion back to fiscal 2019’s $5.46 trillion. That would provide all the government that Americans savored or spurned just before COVID-19 wrecked everything.
And, thereafter, DOGE should use zero-based budgeting to evaluate every federal department, agency, program, military base, civilian building, outpost, and payroll. If the corresponding federal official cannot explain why a particular expenditure is both constitutional and vital to national security, prosperity, and freedom, then onto the ash heap of history it goes.
This will not be easy, and the weeping will make the faint-hearted cry, cry, cry. But the rampant federal spending must stop. If not, within our lifetimes, America will follow the Roman Empire into oblivion.
Pruning Big Government to pre-COVID-19 dimensions and challenging every subsequent dollar will give America a fighting chance to deserve our 250th birthday in 2026 and survive until our tricentennial in 2076.
So, tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 2019!
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
