The Cost of Trump Golfing, DOGE Savings, and Talking Seriously About the Budget

The media have consistently done a horrible job in describing government spending to their audience. They express budget figures in millions, billions, and trillions, even though they all recognize these numbers are meaningless to the bulk of their audience. Often, they are not even clear on the time period over which the spending would take place, not indicating whether it is a one-year, two-year, or ten-year expenditure.

As a result of this failing by the media the vast majority of Americans are incredibly confused about the shape of the budget. Polls routinely show that the public think that a quarter to a third of the budget goes to areas like foreign aid and welfare, when the actual figure is close to 1.0 percent.

This is why Elon Musk could gain applause for running around like an idiot with his chainsaw promising to eliminate widespread government waste. As it turned out, he eliminated only a tiny fraction of the $2 trillion he targeted and much of what he eliminated would not fit most people’s definitions of waste.

To take one important example, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was a George W. Bush program that saved tens of millions of lives in its two decades of existence. Musk nixed it with his chainsaw saving us around $6 billion a year.

Are we going to pocket a lot of money as a result of Elon’s chainsaw? The savings are equal to about 0.09 percent of the annual budget or 0.6 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. My guess is that people who see the PEPFAR budget expressed as a share of total spending are far less impressed with Elon’s chainsaw work than those who just heard the $6 billion a figure, which is admittedly a large sum to anyone who is not Elon Musk.

News outlets could express budget numbers in a context that would make them understandable to their audiences, it would take about ten seconds of extra work, but they choose not to. People can speculate as to the media’s motive in refusing to take ten seconds to make their budget reporting meaningful, but the fact is they don’t.

It is fashionable among political types to insist that it doesn’t matter if people have any idea where their tax dollars are going. They would be just as likely to support foreign aid or programs for the poor if they thought 30 percent of the budget was going to these purposes as if they knew 1 percent was actually going to them. Not being a six- or seven-figure political consultant, I never learned this fact.

Anyhow, with this background, it seemed worth having a little fun comparing the cost of Donald Trump’s golf games with the big bucks he and his allies are promising to save us by cutting back or eliminating spending on areas like the Government Accountability Office, the Library of Congress, and National Public Radio.

Starting with the Trump golf games, his time on the links actually costs us a surprisingly large sum of money. The issue isn’t paying his green fees, the problem is that we need to have a whole Secret Service entourage follow him around on the golf course as well as securing the perimeters to prevent a potential assailant from being able to get close to Trump. The Huffington Post put the cost to the government of a Trump golf outing at around $5.4 million in 2017, which would come to a bit over $7 million a round in 2025 dollars. If Trump keeps golfing at the pace he did in his first two months in office, his golf games will cost taxpayers around $183 million a year.

That would be somewhat less than the $414 million that the Republicans are looking to save by cutting the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) budget in half. For those not familiar with it, GAO does what DOGE was supposed to do. It scrutinizes government spending to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. It has identified hundreds of billions of waste and fraud over the years. Apparently, the Republicans don’t think eliminating waste and fraud is a good thing.

The Republicans are also looking to eliminate the $550 million a year that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The savings here would be approximately three times the cost of Donald Trump’s golf games. And they are also looking to cut $181 million a year, roughly the cost of Trump’s golf games, from the budget of the Library of Congress.

Here’s the picture giving the relative size of the cuts.

None of this tells us very much about the federal budget. We will spend over $1,500 billion on Social Security this year and roughly $1,000 billion on the military. The biggest item in the chart, the $550 million cut to the CPB, is just over 0.05 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. The others are all less, even if they might be large compared with what we have to pay to send Donald Trump golfing.

We shouldn’t want to see the government waste money on anything, even if it is not a large category of spending. But people should know the amount of money at stake. People may not think it is a good idea to spend $550 million a year supporting the CPB, but they should know that eliminating this spending will not mean a big reduction in their tax bill or free up some big pot of money for universal health care or free college.

It would be nice if the media viewed it as their responsibility when reporting on the budget to make the numbers meaningful to their audience. Unfortunately, this is apparently not a concern for reporters.