Joe Scarborough Torches Elon Musk and ‘Team DOGE’s’ Promise of $2 Trillion In Cuts As a Pipe Dream
Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough dismissed Elon Musk and ‘Team DOGE’s’ promise to find $2 trillion in spending cuts as a pipe dream that has little to no chance of actually becoming reality.
Scarborough joined Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday and argued his own time in Congress (1995-2001) is the reason he knows DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) will likely have not much influence on actual spending cuts. According to the MSNBC host, members of Congress are too fearful to actually take up real cuts to the budget because the majority of spending goes to things like Medicaid and Social Security, topics that could end up negatively impacting their sway with voters.
“What is your expectation in terms of the influence that either an Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy, the DOGE, team DOGE, is ultimately going to have over Congress?” Sorkin asked Scarborough.
“Not a lot,” Scarborough bluntly said.
The former Republican member of Congress argued:
I say not a lot because as somebody that’s obsessed on balancing the budget, you know, back in the ’90s, we balanced it four years in a row, only time that happened in the century, what you find out very quickly is 80% of the budget is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense spending, interest on the debt, things that members of Congress are not going to want to touch. So where are you going to get your $2 trillion? Well, first of all, you’re not unless you go to where the money is, and I just told you where 80% of the budget is. Are they going to really cut veterans benefits? No, I don’t think so. At the end of the day, are they really going to cut infrastructure projects, kill infrastructure projects? I don’t think so.
Scarborough did express hope that Musk can “update and modernize” many federal government agencies who are decades behind, technology wise, in how they operate.
Scarborough said:
I think the hope is that actually Elon Musk uses his vast talents to actually update and modernize a federal government that seems to be stuck, technology wise, in the ’80s or the ’90s. He’s going to make a lot more progress there than he will finding $2 trillion. I think the national debt is a bubble a bill that’s going to come due and we’re going to get crushed as an economy if we don’t get serious about fiscal discipline, we haven’t been serious about it since 2006, but they’re not going to do it by going through the government and slashing $2 trillion unless they’re going to talk about Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid.
Watch above via CNBC.
