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Slashing the $2 Trillion US Deficit

The new administration is charged with slashing the $2 Trillion US deficit, and while it’s a lot of money, there are a lot of easy places to find it.

Slashing the  Trillion US Deficit

January 27, 2025

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

US government spending is so outrageous, people become numb to the actual size.

  • 1 Million seconds = 11.5 days
  • 1 Billion seconds = 31.7 years
  • 1 Trillion seconds = 317 centuries

Now apply this same math to dollars. It’s a LOT. The obesity problem isn’t just in people’s weight. It’s in government as well. The US has become a rather gluttonous mass with a debt based economy. The government absolutely behaves this way with impunity and its people have largely followed that lead.

From the sounds of the Trump administration’s rhetoric, the US might be going on a massive crash diet. Slashing the $2 Trillion US deficit is no small task, but there appears to be a lot of stuff on the chopping block.

International Cuts

  • Paris Accord – Trump has the wheels in motion by executive order to get the US out of the Paris Accord. In addition, he paused all foreign climate financing. That’s $11 Billion. In addition, he’s declared an “energy emergency” and is seeking ways to deregulate the energy industry to allow for higher US production. So far, a deal has been struck between Louisiana based oil company, Argent, and the Bangladesh government as a result.

    Since coming to power Trump has taken executive action to end the Department of Energy’s pause on licenses to export the super-chilled gas to countries that do not have free trade agreements with the United States, as he tries to increase U.S. exports of LNG. The United States is already the largest exporter of LNG in the world and is expected to double its capacity by 2028, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.
  • WHO – The US will be leaving the World Health Organization. The US pays in $1.224 Billion of their $6.8 billion budget. But not any more. Trump says:

    ...[T]he global health agency had mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and other international health crises.

    …[T]he WHO had failed to act independently from the “inappropriate political influence of WHO member states” and required “unfairly onerous payments” from the U.S. that were disproportionate to the sums provided by other, larger countries, such as China.

    “World Health ripped us off, everybody rips off the United States. It’s not going to happen anymore.”
  • Foreign Aid – As of 2023, US foreign aid came to $68 Billion. But the most recent executive order puts a 90 day freeze on all foreign aid with the exception of Israel and Egypt, with no new contracts to be signed, and a stop work order on all existing contracts. This includes Ukraine. During this time, each of these aid packages are to be reviewed to see what the US gets out of it in return.

Slashing the $2 Trillion US deficit isn’t going to be easy, but this is a great start and aligns with the populist movement of “America First” for the Trump supporters.

Domestic Cuts

Federal Employment Restructure – The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the biggest driver of all domestic cuts, to be sure. As such, every agency will be required to appoint their own DOGE team to work with the larger Elon Musk team.

Fun twist: “Advocacy groups filed at least four lawsuits Monday [01/20/2025] to prevent President Donald Trump and his Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency from holding secret meetings or withholding documents about its recommendations.” There are some scared folks, worried the gravy train is letting them off at the next station.

There’s a federal hiring freeze and reinstituting a previous executive order to make it easier to fire federal employees.

Most things on the domestic side are frozen until his teams can get into place, but that hasn’t stopped him from cutting some people off in the mean time. Still the freeze means, no new regulations, no new hires, nothing until his teams get in.

He gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. On Tuesday January 21, everyone received a memo saying the department is eliminating the membership of all advisory committees as part of a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”

It appears to be a redundency to the TSA, and while the this committee will technically still exist, it won’t have any members to work in it.

He let go a good number of employees as well, he let go the head of the TSA, David Pekoske, and US Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan. He pulled security clearances for so far nearly 50 individuals, including: John Bolton, James Clapper, John Brennan, and Leon Panetta.

This section is more of a “to be continued”, as the next few months unfold. But some good suggestions have come out:

  • Cutting federal K-12 education subsidies: $30 billion. In fact get rid of the Department of Education altogether: $238 billion. Relegate education back to the states.
  • Cutting federal funding for local rail systems: $20 billion. Two words: California Literail.
  • Trump has frozen the Inflation Reduction Act’s environmental agenda. If he ends it, that’s $100 billion
  • Cutting broadband subsidies: $65 billion (Remember Kamala Harris’s $42 billion failure to get rural America connected through broadband? Not one home was connected.)
  • Cutting public housing spending and subsidies: $55 billion. That needs to be handled on the local level.
  • Cutting community development grants: $21 billion. This can also happen at the state level or even at the private level through charities.

Rand Paul rolls out his annual airing of grievances for Festivus and honestly, if you told Americans their government was going to hault an experiment involving shrimp running on treadmills, they wouldn’t care. A lot of little petty programs and projects are being run for no reason, and that adds up too.

There are honestly countless agencies that could be elliminated that would have zero impact on the everyday lives of Americans. Slashing the $2 trillion deficit, and even finding a surplus to get the country out of debt is not insurmountable.

Sacred Cows

It’s worth mentioning there are some sacred cows that don’t appear to be on the chopping block: Social Security, Medicare, Military, and aid to Israel. And these are juggernauts.

  • Social Security is $1.35 TRILLION, which is 22% of the federal budget.
  • Medicare is $1.03 TRILLION, which is 14% of the federal budget.
  • Military is $916 BILLION
  • Israel is $3.8 BILLION

The first two are Ponzi schemes, but the majority of Americans think “they paid in, and therefore are entitled to draw from it” as if it was a typical retirement fund. The military, while technically constitutional, has failed every audit it’s ever undergone. If the DoD could just pass one audit and account for its spending… I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

And Israel isn’t part of the US. They don’t pay taxes. They fund US politicians. But when you got citizens suffering from the aftermath of hurricanes and fires, it’s a tough sell to put other countries first.

It’s not that slashing the $2 Trillion US deficit is impossible. It’s about finding the political will to do it. The majority of the spending is unnecessary. They should be cutting and/or deferring to the states for most things.

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