Slash The Fat: 16 Agencies To Terminate
Under our three savings bucket scheme, “Slashing the Fat” from the Federal payroll and bureaucracy would account for just $400 billion or 20% of DOGE’s $2 trillion per year savings target. Needless to say, however, even that small portion would be far easier said than done. --[snip]-- So we begin the payroll savings analysis by bringing the hammer down terminally on the 16 worst and most unneeded Federal agencies, including the FBI, OSHA, the FTC, and the Department of Education.
Slash The Fat: 16 Agencies To Terminate
Thursday, Jan 30, 2025 - 07:25 PM
Authored by David Stockman via The Brownstone Institute,
[The following is excerpted from Chapter One of David Stockman’s latest book, How To Cut $2 Trillion: A Blueprint From Ronald Reagan’s Budget Cutter To Musk, Ramaswamy, and the DOGE Team.]
Under our three savings bucket scheme, “Slashing the Fat” from the Federal payroll and bureaucracy would account for just $400 billion or 20% of DOGE’s $2 trillion per year savings target. Needless to say, however, even that small portion would be far easier said than done.
That’s because, unlike the case of typical US businesses, where payroll costs can range from 15% to 40% of total costs, such expenses comprise only a tiny fraction of total Federal spending. Setting aside DOD payrolls for the “Downsize the Muscle” bucket, we estimate fully-loaded nondefense employee compensation costs at $215 billion in the target year of FY 2029. That’s just 3.1% of the $7 trillion of nondefense outlays projected under current policy by CBO for what would be the final Trump budget.
So there is a lot of wood to chop in other areas of nondefense spending, but we start with the assumption that $85 billion or 40% of nondefense payroll costs would be a fair component of a broader plan to generate the $400 billion of “Slash the Fat” savings. At the projected FY 2029 cost of $160,000 per Federal employee for payroll, benefits, and fringes, this would require termination of 535,000 positions from the current total of 1,343,000 nondefense employees.
On its face, this headcount reduction target is eminently plausible given that the Washington Swamp is a vast cesspool of padded payrolls, useless projects, endemic inefficiency, and misbegotten government enterprises. But what is especially telling is that our 40% payroll cut would amount to just half of the 80% staff reduction that Elon Musk achieved at the old Twitter. And he did so in the context of a labor-intensive business without missing a beat in terms of operations and customer accommodation at the new “X.”
So we begin the payroll savings analysis by bringing the hammer down terminally on the 16 worst and most unneeded Federal agencies, including the FBI, OSHA, the FTC, and the Department of Education. Eliminating these 16 bureaucracies entirely would reduce Federal employment by 71,000 jobs and save $11.1 billion per year of direct compensation costs. That’s nothing to sneeze at, of course, but to place it in budgetary context it does represent only 13 hours’ worth of the $8.0 trillion per year of total baseline Federal spending for the target budget year of FY 2029.
[snip]
To read the rest of this article, go here: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/slash-fat-16-agencies-terminate