The problem(s) with the White House’s defense of Elon Musk’s DOGE endeavor.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested DOGE will help prevent national “bankruptcy.” There’s reason to believe she has this backwards.

But as The Washington Post noted, the White House’s latest line on the Republican megadonor’s efforts included some talking points the public doesn’t often hear:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday defended Elon Musk, who leads the U.S. DOGE Service, and its efforts to shrink the federal government, saying he ‘is trying to save democracy.’ ... ‘The United States of America will cease to exist. Our government will fail if we continue to go down the road of bankruptcy,’ she said during a Fox News interview, labeling some federal program spending as ‘wasteful and useless priorities.’

The president’s chief spokesperson delivered the lines with apparent confidence, as if the public should take such rhetoric seriously
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3llou2xdmfd2b

Link to tweet

......It’s a problem, of course, that DOGE has struggled at times with arithmetic, at one point famously confusing $8 billion with $8 million. But it’s a bigger problem that DOGE-driven disruptions at the Internal Revenue Service are poised to be extraordinarily expensive. The Washington Post reported last week:

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue. ... ‘The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,’ said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

To be sure, these figures are based on projections that may or may not prove true — we’ll know more after the April 15 tax deadline — but the dire assessment, the Post’s report added, is based in part on the White House’s “rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.”

If Leavitt is correct and the United States of America “will cease to exist” without fiscal reforms, shouldn’t the White House do largely the opposite of what Trump and Musk have spent the last 10 weeks doing?