The DOGE has found something really great for Donald Trump
Hard at work this weekend Donald Trump was on Air force One en route from Mar-a-Lago to the Super Bowl Trump dropped another wild, radical idea. He told reporters that DOGE had found “irregularities” in US Treasuries which means there may be do obligation to pay them. He said, “maybe we have less debt than we thought.”
Are the Wall St boys ok with Trump saying that the teenage DOGEboys have found some “irregularities” in US treasuries and the US may not have to pay them. Maybe we have less debt than we thought,” he said. That’s completely daft but it’s predictable that Trump’s desperately looking for a shortcut to cutting the deficit. Unfortunately for him, just as with the birthright citizenship question, that pesky 14th Amendment is standing in the way with yet another crystal clear direction:
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
“Shall not be questioned.” In short, by the time they get to the payment center at the US Treasury the ship has sailed. They are debts that have to be paid. The place to question a charge of fraud, waste or abuse is much earlier in the process and, by the way, with legitimate constitutional, legal methods not some ketamine addled teenage getting a vibe.
Marshall assumes that this is just another blast of hot air from the gasbag in chief. But even so, he’s playing with fire. As he noted:
One other point worth noting is that Trump seems to be basing this on some analysis from the DOGE boys. This appears to have been one of the DOGE boys main goals at Treasury, getting access to details about what kinds of payments Treasury makes, the answer being close to everything the US government does outside of the Pentagon and some of the Pentagon stuff too. The Treasury also services the US debt, which is what we’re talking about here. I’m less clear on what access in what part of Treasury Department these guys could have gotten more information about how the Treasury Department sells and service Treasury notes.
But all that detail aside, imagine thinking that by downloading a ton of data and having a few days to analyze it you could make the determination that a significant amount of the US national debt wasn’t real and didn’t have to be paid.
Will this happen? Who knows? I wouldn’t have thought that adolescent incels would be running the government by the middle of February and yet here we are.