Shootout in DOGE City

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending -- things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
64% : What can the new sheriffs in town actually do to cut government inefficiency?
63% : Ramaswamy said DOGE will closely review CHIPS Act contracts, especially those the Biden administration accelerated.
59% : The leaders of President-elect Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been meeting with Republican lawmakers recently.
51% : That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.
50% : Trump promised to protect those programs.
45% : If Schedule F could be implemented early in Trump 2.0 (the plan was started in Trump 1.0 but failed to get any traction), it would be a decisive tool in clearing out civil service deadwood.
41% : Agencies generally must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to amend or revoke rules, though Musk and Ramaswamy suggest Trump may be able to revoke some rules unilaterally via executive order.
32% : That leaves around 30 percent of the budget "discretionary," though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut.
30% : More generally, law firm Gibson Dunn notes Musk and Ramaswamy have said Trump may decline to spend appropriations for which Congress's authorizations have expired (called impoundment, though confounded by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.)
26% : Musk and Ramaswamy also believe Trump could direct agencies not to enforce some cumbersome regulations or those he believes are unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court precedent.
20% : Trump could impose a government-wide hiring freeze, as he did when he took office in 2017, though many feel this may be too blunt an instrument.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.