How Trump/DOGE Can Balance The Budget And Eliminate $110 Trillion of Future Debt,Part 4

Outside of the entitlement type domestic expenditures outlined in Part 3, Federal nondefense baseline spending would total about $1.761 trillion by 2029, according to CBO. In this context, the Trump/DOGE Balanced Budget plan would reduce these outlays by about 14.8% or $260 billion—with a phase-in from savings of $165 billion in 2026.

Domestic Spending Excluding Entitlements: CBO Baseline/Savings/% Cut

• 2026: $1.741 trillion/$165 billion/9.5%.

• 2027: $1.784 trillion/$212 billion/11.9%.

• 2028: $1.869 trillion/$251 billion/13.4%.

• 2029: $1.761 trillion/260 billion/14.8%.

• 4-Year Total: $7.155 trillion/$888 billion/12.4%.

As detailed below, the $260 billion of savings targeted for 2029 are distributed among four broad program categories.

2029 Domestic Discretionary Program Savings:

• Energy Subsidies: $60 billion.

• Farmer Subsidies: $40 billion.

• Other Business Subsidies: $30 billion.

• 40% Nondefense staff and overhead cuts: $130 billion.

• Total 2029 savings: $260 billion.

Eliminate $60 Billion Per Year Of Energy Boondoggles

Back in the day as a member of the Energy Committee in the US House and at OMB we fought the 1970s energy subsidy boondoggles tooth and nail because they were anti-free market but also because they were based on a sheer falsehood. That is, the notion that the world was running out of fossil fuels rapidly and that only a state-orchestrated transition to renewables and artificial conservation intermediated by heavy subsidies, tax credits and regulatory mandates could save the nation from ruin.

As it happened, in the early 1980’s we succeeded in eliminating most of these Nixon-Ford-Carter energy market interventions. But these Reagan policy reversals did not lead to ruin at all. That’s because fossil fuel depletion was a complete myth, which myth failed to grasp that higher prices and better technology would substantially expand the “economically recoverable” fossil resource base. As it happened, therefore, global oil and natural gas production rose from 85 million BOEs/day (barrels of oil equivalent) in 1980 to 130 million BOEs/day in 2023.

That’s a 53% gain in a world that Al Gore 1.0 (yes, he was our nemesis on the US House Energy and Power subcommittee) claimed was rapidly depleting its fossil resources. But rather than accepting the fact that they were dead wrong, Gore 2.0 and his fellow energy statists just turned the argument upside-down after the mid-1980s oil glut rendered their fossil fuel exhaustion theory a laughingstock. So by the late 1980s they were claiming, in opposite fashion, that the world was actually suffering from a surfeit of fossil fuel, which was causing a catastrophic global warming!

Needless to say, the so-called AGW (anthropogenic global warming) threat is based on junk science and the will to power by the likes of the UN, Al Gore and national government statists who make a living and career out of fighting the fossil fuel industry. As is evident from the geology-based graph below, however, both current global temperatures and CO2 concentrations at 15C and 440 ppm, respectively, are at epochal lows.