Will Elon's Team of Elite Math Twinks Tell Him That You Can't Close a $1.8 Trillion Budget Gap By Eliminating a $0.04 Trillion Agency?

Which genius will spot the error?

Above: Elon and his team summon new insights about the federal budget. (Image generated by Dall-E)

Much attention is being paid to the squad of barely legal mathletes that Elon Musk has tasked with restructuring the government. Wired reports that six Musk-approved whiz kids aged 19-24 are currently holed up in a General Services Administration office and are working around the clock to slash government spending. We still don’t know much about what they’re doing, how much access they have, or whether any of it is legal. But one thing does seem clear: That room must smell fucking awful. Six pimply-faced geeks working non-stop in a low-ceilinged GSA office? That room probably smells like a warm-weather fish cannery mixed with Satan’s ball sweat.

Elon is basically trying to pull a Dave. In the 1993 light-comedy film Dave, an imposter president — played by the always-excellent Kevin Kline — needs to slash the budget. How much? I hope you’re sitting down…he needs to cut 650 MILLION dollars! So, Dave calls his accountant buddy from home, they order some food, roll up their sleeves, and make the necessary cuts. Because that’s how it works, right? All you really need to balance the budget is some common sense, a pot of coffee, and an Apple 2e running Quicken.

In Elon’s version of this movie, the accountant role is being played by this delightful-seeming nerd, this much-less-delightful-seeming nerd, and four other dweebs. And some people like the idea of a group of numbers-oriented savants disrupting the system. Many Twitter profiles with Roman bust avatars are giving the group plaudits, and Fox News has published a glowing profile of Seal Team Sexless (sorry, that was cheap shot).

And I’ll admit: I kind of get it. If I put aside my belief that none of this is legal and my longstanding conviction that all humans under 25 are only fit to spin large signs advertising sub sandwich shops, then I sort of get the appeal. I like nerds! They often do good work! In theory, nimble minds with cutting-edge tools could find things that other people would miss.

But if that’s true, then surely, inevitably, one of these geniuses MUST tell Elon that eliminating USAID doesn’t make a frosty fuck’s bit of difference to the overall budget picture. USAID’s budget in 2023¹ was $43 billion; the budget deficit last year was $1.8 trillion. So, if you took the entire USAID building with all its employees inside, dumped it in the Potomac, and sent every recipient of USAID money an “enjoy your AIDS” singing telegram, that would close 2.4% of the budget deficit. It would reduce overall government spending by 0.64%. Surely, one of Elon’s baby geniuses will inform him that this is not the fast track to solvency that it’s being made out to be.

Someone with elite-level math skills will also surely notice that budget solvency won’t be achieved by firing federal workers. Not even close: The non-military federal workforce costs about $108 billion² annually. So, a real once-in-a-generation savant — I’m talking a legitimate John Nash-level beautiful mind — might calculate that even achieving the not-possible-or-desirable goal of eliminating every last non-military federal worker would close about one seventeenth of the budget gap (even if firing that many people would have no negative macroeconomic effects, though it definitely would). Also, maybe one of these whiz kids can hook a quantum computer up to some 20th gen AI and calculate that if 20,000 federal workers take the much ballyhooed “buyout” — which is the number that the White House is currently bragging about — that’s less than one percent of the federal workforce. Which works out to a savings of perhaps a billion dollars a year, or 1/1,800th of what Musk’s team needs to find.

Except that six percent of the federal workforce retires every year, so the buyout might just end up paying people to do something that they were going to do anyway. It might not save any money — we could even lose money. Be sure to include that in the algorithm, kids!

And surely, undoubtedly, if there’s one thing that’s obvious in all of this, it’s that Elon’s team of human supercomputers will immediately conclude that the absolute last thing we should do if we’re serious about the budget is to extend Trump’s tax cuts. That would cost about $400 billion a year, equal to ten USAIDs. But don’t worry: That’s the type of low-hanging fruit that a half Vulcan prodigy will spot in a nanosecond. I’m sure that one member of the Virgin Voltron (again: sorry) is marching into the Oval Office right now and saying — in a squeaky, adolescent voice — “Mister President, the tax cuts are off the table.”

Believe it or not, smart people have looked at the budget before. And I don’t just mean faux-president Dave’s earnest CPA friend from Honest Pete’s Old-Timey Mom & Pop Accounting Firm And Bait Shop. Smart, numbers-oriented people like Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute have made budget analysis their career. And Riedl recently shared her thoughts on Elon’s project in a tweet thread that included this paragraph:

I’ve spent decades studying the federal budget. I know that $7 trillion(!) behemoth inside and out – where the money really goes, and where the savings opportunities lie. So I can also detect bullshitters who talk tough about trillion-dollar spending cuts without doing their homework. It’s the ones who claim most spending goes to undefined “waste,” federal salaries, immigrants, foreigners, Ukraine, or non-working welfare recipients. It’s the ones who claim we can easily balance the budget or cut $1 trillion without specifying exactly what line-items to cut. Or that we can return to 2019 spending levels for each program, which means a 20% inflationary cut, defaulting on the federal debt, and kicking off every senior who has since retired into Social Security and Medicare. It’s all hot air and empty bluster. Tough talk without following through on anything substantive. Just wait until you see the final deficit numbers in October.

Unlike Riedl, I’m not a budget expert. And unlike the members of Stridex Squadron (deepest apologies, that was the last one), I’m not a preternatural math genius. But even I know that the budget deficit will only be closed through tax hikes and/or cuts to popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, and defense. That’s just basic math. So if I know that, then Elon’s brainiacs must have figured it out before their homemade supercomputers even finished booting up!

Unless — and this thought is so cynical that I hesitate to even type it — Musk’s team was chosen largely because they’re too young to question what’s happening. Maybe there’s some dynamic that would prevent a 20 year-old from going to his boss, who is also the richest man in the world, and saying “these numbers don’t remotely add up.” He might, for some reason, be reluctant to use words like “overpromised”, “mathematically impossible”, or “boss, you’re an overconfident dilettante who needs to buy larger t-shirts”. He might even be pliant enough to do whatever he’s told and naive enough to not understand the ramifications of what he’s doing.

That’s all hypothetically speaking, of course. I’m sure that’s not the case here. I’m confident that Elon chose his guys purely for their surreal numbers chops. And with that being true, I’m equally confident that those geniuses are drafting a memo to the president at this very moment that says: “It has to either be tax hikes or defense and entitlement cuts, end of story.”

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1. 2023 is the most recent budget year I can find, partly because Elon has pulled down the entire USAID website. Most of the budget links I can find go do dead web pages.

2. In 2022 — the most recent year for which I could find numbers — compensation for the civilian federal workforce was $271 billion. But 60% of that “civilian” workforce is military — they work for the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, or Department of Homeland Security (though they’re not active duty, and hence “civilian”). The remaining, non-military employees make $108 billion.