Debt and Interest Rates

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Will Gottsegen at The Atlantic:

Why are rates rising? The Fed’s reaction to inflation is one reason. It may also have something to do with the extreme investments being made in AI, and these companies’ demand for credit. And it’s likely connected to the deficit panic—concern about the expansion of the national debt and the government’s ability to sustain it. Investors are starting to think of long-term Treasurys as riskier than they once did, and they’re demanding more money in exchange for taking on America’s debt. At the same time, the federal government has shown no real appetite to pull its two main levers for reducing the debt: cutting spending and raising taxes.

Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Atlantic a few months ago that he’d “flipped from dove to hawk”—and told me this week that it was partly the government’s complacency on this issue that spurred this change. “Neither side seems particularly motivated to do much of anything about this,” he said. Rather than attending to the debt problem, politicians of both parties have instituted major tax cuts and increased spending over the past 25 years. The U.S. had its credit downgraded by a major ratings agency last spring, in part because of rising debt. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add an estimated $4.7 trillion to the deficit through 2035, and Donald Trump’s efforts to decrease immigration will add another half a trillion to that number over the same period, per the Congressional Budget Office.

GAO Confirms That DOGE Was Sketchy

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations GAO-26-108615 Published: Aug 06, 2026. Publicly Released: Aug 06, 2026.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began posting its estimated savings on a web page known as the Wall of Receipts on February 17, 2025. As of July 7, 2026, the Wall of Receipts reported savings of $110 billion across contracts, grants, and leases, but some savings estimates are incorrect or lack supporting evidence. While DOGE provided some information about estimated savings, several issues limit the transparency and reliability of these reported savings.

• DOGE was not transparent regarding methodologies used to calculate savings. Specifically, DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate the majority of savings associated with the contracts reported as terminated. For grants, DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings. Similarly, the Wall of Receipts does not include an explanation of how the savings from terminated leases were calculated.
• The Wall of Receipts includes leases identified for termination before DOGE was established. Specifically,108 of the 264 leases identified for termination on the Wall of Receipts, about $15.3 million of the total $53.5 million in savings, were already in process for termination when DOGE was established.
• GAO’s review of selected contracts identified potential cost savings, but the basis for some reported savings is unknown. For example, DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide. While DOGE initially identified the contract for termination, in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved.

While the Wall of Receipts includes some information about the data and sources underlying reported savings, it does not sufficiently disclose limitations affecting data quality. GAO’s key practices for transparently reporting government information state that federal government websites should disclose known data quality issues and limitations.

DOGE launched the initial iteration of the Wall of Receipts in February 2025 less than a month after the entity was established in January 2025. Since the initial launch, there have been no updates on the site to shed additional light on the cost savings methodology or to disclose any data limitations. As of July 7, 2026, the web page remains live. Because U.S. DOGE Service officials did not respond to requests for information, GAO could not determine the reasons why DOGE did not disclose data quality issues and limitations when the website first went live or at any time since then. Publicly reporting government data, such as on the Wall of Receipts, can have significant value. However, conveying the methodologies used to calculate savings, as well as any data limitations on the Wall of Receipts, would provide policymakers and the public with the needed caveats to better interpret and use the information.

Make America Sick Again

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

The United States has now recorded more cases of measles in 2026 than in any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000, a grim sign that the country may be headed toward a new era in which the disease regularly sickens thousands every year.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children. More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.

Reversing course on measles would require a nationwide push to improve vaccination rates, a prospect that experts said seemed unlikely under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has halted funding for vaccine hesitancy research, downplayed the risks of measles and spearheaded a hunt for evidence that vaccines are unsafe.

In November, a panel of international experts will meet to determine whether the United States has lost its elimination status, which has long been viewed as one of the country’s crowning public health achievements.

Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

Americans now have to deal with a salmonella outbreak affecting eggs, on top of everything else.

Midwest Poultry Services is recalling close to 1.6 million white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday. The eggs in question have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, and were being sold at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery stores in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

The company has stopped distributing eggs produced on its Texas farms, according to the FDA. Salmonella enteritidis is a bacterium that can survive on the shell of an egg or inside it, and could cause symptoms including cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, ⁠fever, and headaches.

The salmonella scare comes after an explosive diarrhea outbreak hit the country from tainted lettuce produced by Taylor Farms. That produce contained cyclospora, a one-celled parasite, and has affected at least 41 states with over 12,000 possible cases. On top of that, the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages.

The Trump administration has cut a lot of the programs that prevented these types of outbreaks in the past, and now the country seems to be dealing with one food crisis after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE cut a monitoring program for the screwworm and gutted the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. Hopefully, the salmonella issue remains isolated, although the administration hasn’t inspired much confidence thus far.

RFK Jr said "We're going to give infectious disease a break for about 8 years"

Cyclospora, Ebola, Hantavirus, measles and salmonella outbreaks later, it's pretty obvious that infectious disease is not going to give *us* a break

And cutting funding for it was a foolish idea pic.twitter.com/mUcSmdK1WQ

— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) July 26, 2026

Depletion Day

Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Lorie Konish at CNBC:

A Social Security trust fund used to pay retirement benefits may run out in late 2032, three months earlier than what had been projected last June, according to the new Social Security Administration annual trustees report released Tuesday.

Social Security uses incoming revenue from payroll taxes to pay benefits. When benefit payments exceed payroll tax income, the program relies on the trust funds to help make up the shortfall.

The report said that if the fund is depleted as projected, Social Security will only be able to pay 78% of retirement benefits.

The new projected depletion date follows the enactment of President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful” tax law, which Social Security’s chief actuary said in an August letter would have “material effects” on the financial status of the trust funds because it impacts income taxation of Social Security benefits. At that point, they estimated late 2032 for the retirement fund depletion date, pushed up from the 2025 trustees report estimate of the first quarter of 2033.

The OASI trust fund — formally known as Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, or OASI — if combined with the disability insurance trust fund, may be able to pay full benefits until the third quarter of 2034, when 83% of benefits will be payable, according to the new report. That estimate is unchanged from the prior trustees report.

The actuary's letter explained:

Because the revenue from income taxation of Social Security benefits is directed to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, implementation of the OBBBA will have material effects on the financial status of the Social Security trust funds.  

 

Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts from Brookings

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Jessica Riedl at Brookings:

Debates over federal taxes, spending, and deficits will always be contentious due to deep disagreements over fiscal priorities, ideologies, and values. Yet these debates are often further hampered by an inability to agree on even the most basic underlying budget data. Simply put, standard liberal and conservative fiscal frameworks are often defended with fallacies regarding the current and projected makeup of taxes and spending, the trends in budget deficits and debt, and the fiscal records of recent presidents.

The new 2026 version of this annual chart book once again provides a standard, non-partisan look at the trends in spending, taxes, and deficits in hope of addressing common fallacies and providing a common starting point for fiscal debates.

The 132-page chart book begins by broadly examining the rising budget deficits and national debt and then dives deeper to show the policies driving the $138 trillion in new CBO-projected deficits over the next three decades—and how drastically the picture worsens if interest rates remain elevated. Next, the chart book shows the size of the reforms needed to stabilize the debt, and how the common “easy solutions” would fail to provide sufficient savings towards that goal. Finally, it examines trends in tax revenues and tax progressivity, slays common budget myths, and offers a full accounting of the fiscal records of Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

These charts—most of which rely on publicly-available data from the Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget, Census Bureau, and U.S. Treasury—nevertheless defy conventional wisdom about spending, taxes, and deficits.

Federal Spending By Age

Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Penn Wharton Budget Model:

• In Fiscal Year 2025, federal outlays totaled over $7 trillion across 52 general spending categories. Within each of these categories, we trace spending at the line item and subcategory level to assign a total of $4.4 trillion in spending across three age groups: retirees; working-age adults; children and young adults. We classify the remaining $2.6 trillion as “all ages” because they finance broad public goods.
• Retirees (ages 65 and older) receive $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of the $4.4 trillion in age-assignable federal outlays, driven mainly by Social Security and Medicare.
• Working-age adults (ages 26–64) receive $1.2 trillion, or 28 percent of age-assignable outlays, spread across Medicaid, Social Security disability benefits, veterans benefits, and Marketplace subsidies.
• Children and young adults (under age 26) receive $449 billion, or 10 percent of age-assignable outlays, concentrated in Medicaid, SNAP, child nutrition, and education programs.
• The heavy expenditure share on retirees is consistent with a voting model from the field of political economy. The retiree share is predicted to increase even more with an aging population and fiscal strain.

Immigrants, the Budget, and Social Security

Many posts have discussed immigration.

  David J. Bier, Michael Howard, and Julián Salazar at Cato:

This paper updates a model of these effects first developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to shed light on how immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their children affect government budgets. This analysis is the first to estimate the cumulative fiscal effect of immigrants on federal, state, and local budgets over 30 years.

The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. \

• The data show:For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
• Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
• Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.

These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis.

....

 Immigrants cost less as retirees: First, the savings on old-age benefits are not because immigrants are significantly less likely to retire. Instead, it is because they are far less likely to receive a government pension, since they were less likely to have government jobs and thus less likely to receive expensive government pensions. The main reason, though, is that they were simply barred from applying for Social Security and Medicare because they either arrived too late in life to earn the necessary qualifying work history, or they are here illegally or in a temporary status and ineligible for that reason.

A 2024 ITEP report by  Carl Davis, Marco Guzman, Emma Sifre:

• Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.
• Undocumented immigrants paid federal, state, and local taxes of $8,889 per person in 2022. In other words, for every 1 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country, public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue.
• More than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are barred from accessing. Undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in 2022.

CMC Connects: Presidential Power in 2026

Hard Power

Executive Orders

Personnel

• Net reduction of 242,260 employees
• Political and ideological considerations
• SCOTUS case on the FTC

Pardons

Use of Force

CRS counts 469 foreign interventions between 1798 and 2022

Since January 20, 2025:

• Venezuela: boat bombings and capture of Maduro):
• Iran: Airstrikes on nuclear facilities 
• Yemen: Air strikes against Houthi militants
• Counterterrorism Strikes in Iraq, Nigeria, and Somalia.

Domestic use of National Guard, CBP, and ICE

Investigation and Prosecution

• James Comey: charges of making false statements to Congress and obstruction related to his 2020 testimony. The indictment was  dismissed.
• John Bolton: indictment for alleged unauthorized retention and transmission of classified information.
• Letitia James New York Attorney General indicted in October 2025 on bank fraud and false statements charges.  Case dismissed. 
•  Jerome H. Powell said DOJ as opened a criminal investigation into Powell; prosecutors are looking at cost overruns.

Threats: Regulatory Action and Funding

• Universities and funding
• Law firms representing Trump adversaries:  contracts
• Media companies and FCC license threats

Soft Power:  "Power to Persuade"

Support from congressional Republicans and One Big Beautiful Bill

Public approval is down

Social Security Trust Fund Runs Empty IN JUST SIX YEARS

Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Mark J. Warshawsky at AEI:

Despite repeated warnings over the last three decades from the Trustees, the Congressional Budget Office, and others of the projected exhaustion of the Social Security Retirement Trust Fund in the mid-2030s, and the need to change the retirement program to make it sustainable, Congress and most Presidential administrations of both political parties have ignored the problem. Similarly, attempts to simplify and modernize the vocational standards for disability benefits have gone nowhere for two decades owing to opposition. Worse still, advocates, analysts and politicians have demagogued these issues, preventing reasonable discussions and compromise. This is despite the fast approach of the exhaustion date of the retirement fund and the context of increasing budget deficits, growing debt, and long-term interest rates higher than economic growth rates. It is becoming clear that this deep-seated reluctance to deal with difficult issues will postpone any action until right up to and perhaps even after the time of fund exhaustion, like recently experienced federal government shutdowns.

   Warshawsky notes some analysts have proposed fixes but adds:

Other analysts, perhaps more jaded, have claimed that even these second-best and third best actions will not be needed, because Congress will simply decide to maintain current benefit levels and continue to increase federal borrowing and fill in the growing Social Security funding gap with general revenues when exhaustion occurs.  Indeed, it has been implicitly doing this since the cash flow to the Trust Fund turned negative in 2010.  The counterargument to this view is that the resource needs for full Social Security benefits will continue to grow, and at the same time the Social Security fund is exhausted, so too will be the Medicare fund, and the costs for Medicaid, veterans, insurance exchange subsidies, and other health programs from rising health care costs and the demographic pressures of an aging population will explode the budget.  Other budget pressures come from national security needs in a competitive, even hostile, global scene, along with rising interest rates and inflation.  Moreover, there may be political resistance in some quarters of both parties to explicitly turn Social Security into a welfare program, dependent on general revenues and the annual budget process, away from its self-contained and stable revenue sources and long-term promised benefits.  These pressures and considerations can be expected to f inally warrant some policy seriousness, albeit with much angst. 

...

Why DOGE Failed

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Alicia Parlapiano and Margot Sanger-Katz at NYT:

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

...

' To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.

Its errors included:

Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.

Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.

DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.

Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.

Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending.

Mitt Romney: Curb Spending and Raise Taxes

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Mitt Romney at NYT:

In 2012, political ads suggested that some of my policy proposals, if enacted, would amount to pushing grandma off a cliff. Actually, my proposals were intended to prevent that very thing from happening.

Today, all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed for a cliff: If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23 percent. The government will need trillions of dollars to make up the shortfall. When lenders refuse to loan the money unless they are paid much higher interest rates, economic calamity will almost certainly ensue. Alternatively, the government could print more money, inducing hyperinflation that devalues the national debt — along with your savings.

Typically, Democrats insist on higher taxes, and Republicans insist on lower spending. But given the magnitude of our national debt as well as the proximity of the cliff, both are necessary. DOGE took a slash-and-burn approach to budget cutting and failed spectacularly. Europe demonstrates that exorbitant taxes without spending restraint crushes economic vitality and thus speeds how fast the cliff arrives.

And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.

Why DOGE Failed

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

At The Dispatch, Jessica Riedl writes that DOGE was incompetent and illegal.  Most important, its assumptions were wrong.

The promise to save trillions of dollars was ultimately doomed by the reality that most federal spending was off limits to DOGE. Roughly two-thirds of all federal spending goes to five items (Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest) that Trump either promised not to cut, or in the case of interest, cannot directly reduce. Attempts by DOGE to scale back Social Security customer service spending as well as assistance at veterans’ hospitals were largely abandoned in the face of a steep backlash. Even much of the remaining one-third of federal spending consists of programs that Trump voters generally support, such as infrastructure, border security, farm subsidies, and law enforcement. Ultimately, DOGE was left to slash cultural totems that benefit MAGA enemies: aid to Africa, DEI contracts, Politico subscriptions, and government employees. And while the potential savings from these expenditures look like a lot of money for a typical family, they represent budget dust in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget.

Because real waste exists in the federal budget, DOGE represents a colossal missed opportunity. After all, Washington has a moral obligation to eliminate unnecessary and wasteful spending in order to minimize the necessary cuts to priority programs. OMB estimates that $191 billion annually is lost to payment errors, which overwhelmingly take place within Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and earned income tax credit payments. Moreover, Washington is plagued with dozens of overlapping programs in areas such as education, economic development, and job training. And the Defense Department has a long record of losing tens of billions of dollars in contract cost overruns.

These examples of wasteful spending are easy to identify yet quite difficult to fix. Cleaning up such waste often involves completely overhauling countless government computer systems, developing new oversight controls (without unduly paralyzing the distribution of legitimate benefits), and coordinating with state governments that share in the administration of key programs. Overhauling these practices across hundreds of federal programs is tedious, complicated, and thankless—which is why it occurs so rarely. Lawmakers will hold hearings and press conferences blasting government waste, yet few are willing to invest significant resources into, for example, reducing Medicaid payment errors. DOGE could have focused on such activities—especially given its leaders’ background in computing technology—yet it seemed to lack the required attention span. Trump and Musk instead prioritized headline-grabbing gimmicks such as demanding a war on “millions” of fraudulent Social Security payments that did not actually exist.

Pocket Rescissions

Previous posts have discussed budget cuts.

 Oriana González at NOTUS:

The Office of Management and Budget’s director, Russell Vought, is the mastermind behind the administration’s pocket rescissions strategy which involves a request from the president to withhold money already appropriated by Congress. But the request comes so late in the fiscal year that Congress doesn’t have enough time to act within the allotted timeframe. and the administration considers the money rescinded once the fiscal year ends.

The Trump White House had so far used pocket rescissions once, when it withheld nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid in August. The Supreme Court allowed the move, effectively greenlighting Vought’s strategy for the near future.

But in July, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, vice chair of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the 12 so-called “cardinals,” quietly added a provision to the fiscal 2026 bill for the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Subcommittee — which funds the agencies most impacted by Trump’s two rescissions requests — that would have addressed pocket rescissions.

The clause, Sec. 7065, would have given Congress an extra 45 days to consider rescissions requests submitted late in the fiscal year.

After the bill text was released, Vought reached out to Díaz-Balart, explaining that the White House was concerned about the provision, one senior White House official told NOTUS. The official said that after Vought relayed the issue, Díaz-Balart removed the provision.

The White House did more than just reach out to Díaz-Balart. Republican appropriators started receiving pressure from the White House to not support the bill if the provision remained, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Spending Cuts: Popular in Theory, Unpopular in Practice

Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget

Jonathan Draeger at RealClearPolling:

The most recent poll analyzing Americans’ hopes for government spending came from The Economist/YouGov, which surveyed 1,623 U.S. adults from Oct. 24-27. When asked about increasing spending across a variety of categories, the only category with more people advocating for less spending than for more was foreign aid, where 21% wanted it to increase while 46% wanted it to decrease. This category was recently highlighted during the Trump administration’s decision to provide $20 billion in financial assistance to Argentina, a move that proved overwhelmingly unpopular, with only 21% approving and 51% disapproving.

On other items, such as national defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, the environment, veterans, and education, many more wanted increased funding than those who wanted decreased funding. The most popular were increased spending on veterans (71%) and Social Security (69%).

While Americans want more spending in almost every category when polled, in another poll from the Cato Institute/YouGov, an overwhelming 76% said the federal government spends too much money, and only 8% said it doesn’t spend enough. Another question found that the average person thinks the federal government should cut spending by 40% across the board, and 64% said cutting spending will mostly help the economy.

These two polls are in conflict. When presented abstractly, Americans want to cut spending. When asked about specific line items, the only popular item to cut is foreign aid. However, foreign aid accounts for only $50-80 billion of the federal budget, depending on the year, or 0.8% to 1.3% of the federal budget.

Malevolence and Incompetence at HHS

Many posts have discussed the chaos at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYT:

The Trump administration on Saturday raced to rescind layoffs of hundreds of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were mistakenly fired on Friday night in what appeared to be a substantial procedural lapse.

Among those wrongly dismissed were the top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

After The New York Times reported the dismissals, two federal health officials said on Saturday that many of those workers were being brought back. The officials spoke anonymously in order to disclose internal discussions.

The mistakes rocked an agency already in tumult, and which has been a particular target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The C.D.C. lost about a third of its staff in April; many were rehired weeks later.

DOGE Failed

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

 Jessie Blaeser at Politico:

The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new POLITICO analysis of public data and federal spending records.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.

Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.

DOGE’s latest figures on contract cuts ticked up to $54.2 billion in an update posted on Tuesday.

POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.

David Lawder at Reuters:

 The U.S. government's budget deficit grew nearly 20% in July to $291 billion despite a nearly $21 billion jump in customs duty collections from President Donald Trump's tariffs, with outlays growing faster than receipts, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday.

The deficit for July was up 19%, or $47 billion, from July 2024. Receipts for the month grew 2%, or $8 billion, to $338 billion, while outlays jumped 10%, or $56 billion, to $630 billion, a record high for the month.

Four Point One Trillion

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

CBO:

CBO responds to a request from Senator Merkley for information about how federal deficits and debt held by the public would be affected by Public Law 119-21, an act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14, and then additionally by making permanent 10 tax provisions that are temporary in that law.

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that over the 2025–2034 period deficits will increase by $3.4 trillion for the legislation as enacted, excluding any macroeconomic or debt‑service effects.

CBO estimates that the additional debt-service costs under the legislation as enacted will total $718 billion over the 10-year period. That change will increase the cumulative effect on the deficit to $4.1 trillion. As a result, and net of any changes in borrowing for federal credit programs, the agency estimates that the legislation will increase debt held by the public at the end of 2034 by 9.5 percentage points relative to CBO's January 2025 baseline budgetary projections of gross domestic product (GDP). Other factors, such as administrative actions affecting tariffs and immigration, also have affected deficits and debt since January 2025 and will be reflected in CBO's next baseline.

Desmond Lachman at The National Interest:

A fundamental weakness of the US economy is that it relies on the kindness of strangers to finance its twin budget and trade deficits. Indeed, of the $29 trillion in outstanding U.S. Treasury bonds, foreigners own over $8 trillion. This makes it of paramount importance that the United States maintains investor confidence that it will not try to inflate or tax its way out from under its debt mountain. If it fails to maintain that confidence, the country could face a crisis in the bond or dollar markets

 

Cutting the National Weather Service

Previous posts have discussed budget cuts.

Christopher Flavelle at NYT:

Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.

Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.

The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

"There's a Flip Side to That Coin."

 A number of posts have discussed "Miles' Law," that is, where you stand depends on where you sit.  Attitudes toward procedures and institutions depend on whether you control them.  At Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write:

Through silence or vocal support, House and Senate Republicans are backing an extraordinary set of new precedents for presidential power they may come to regret if and when Democrats seize those same powers.

Here are 10 new precedents, all set with minimal GOP dissent: 

1. Presidents can limit the classified information they share with lawmakers after bombing a foreign country without the approval of Congress.
2.  Presidents can usurp Congress's power to levy tariffs, provided they declare a national emergency.
3. Presidents can unilaterally freeze spending approved by Congress, and dismantle or fire the heads of independent agencies established by law.
4. Presidents can take control of a state's National Guard, even if the governor opposes it, and occupy the state for as long as said president wants.
5. Presidents can accept gifts from foreign nations, as large as a $200 million plane, even if it's unclear whether said president gets to keep the plane at the end of the term.
6. Presidents can actively profit from their time in office, including creating new currencies structured to allow foreign nationals to invest anonymously, benefiting said president.
7. Presidents can try to browbeat the Federal Reserve into cutting interest rates, including by floating replacements for the Fed chair before their term is up.
8. Presidents can direct the Justice Department to prosecute their political opponents and punish critics. These punishments can include stripping Secret Service protections, suing them and threatening imprisonment.
9. Presidents can punish media companies, law firms and universities that don't share their viewpoints or values.
10. Presidents can aggressively pardon supporters, including those who made large political donations as part of their bid for freedom. The strength of the case in said pardons is irrelevant.

Between the lines: Friday's Supreme Court ruling limiting nationwide injunctions — a decision widely celebrated by Republicans — underscores the risks of partisan precedent-setting.Conservatives sped to the courts to block many of President Biden's signature policies — and succeeded.

And since losing control of the Senate, Democrats have gone quiet on abolishing the filibuster. 

For decades, Democrats said that the term "states' rights" was coded racism -- until they used the term in defense of same-sex marriage.

Lobbyists and the Senate Parliamentarian

Many posts have discussed lobbying.

Taylor Giorno at NOTUS:

The time during which a reconciliation bill is with the Senate parliamentarian would be a prime opportunity for lobbyists to get provisions tweaked or washed out.

Except the industry built on access has little influence with her: Elizabeth MacDonough is one of the rare players on Capitol Hill that refuses to meet with lobbyists.

“Cursing them. Yes. Lobbying them. No,” one Republican lobbyist texted NOTUS of the parliamentarian.

MacDonough is “effectively one of the most powerful women in the free world,” a Democratic lobbyist told NOTUS. Senate committees have been working for weeks with the parliamentarian on several facets of the Republican mega-bill, and they’ve already had to rework parts of the bill that the parliamentarian rejected.

While lobbyists can’t directly lobby the parliamentarian, several said they are trying to backchannel their demands through the process. Their targets include Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a tax on profits from third-party litigation funding and a 10-year moratorium on new state artificial intelligence regulations.

“A large part of the role we play is helping educate the staff and give them the ammunition to make the best arguments to their boss, for the parliamentarian,” Rich Gold, a Holland & Knight partner and leader of the firm’s public policy and regulation group, told NOTUS.

If a client is concerned about a provision in the bill, lobbyists could draft a Byrd memo to bring to senate staffers or provide them with “whatever supplementary information I think would be helpful in making the argument to knock a provision out of the bill,” the Democratic lobbyist said.

“A lobbyist like myself, we insert ourselves into the process by supplying evidence and arguments and detail to the minority, if they wish to use it, for including in their memo and their arguments to the parl,” they added.

...

“If you’re asking me, ‘Can you bamboozle Elizabeth?’ The answer is no,” said Jim Manley, who spent more than two decades working in the Senate, including a stint with the late Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

“There’s no lobbyists sitting there manipulating the process,” Manley added, although he noted lobbyists “serve increasingly as a research arm for staffers on Capitol Hill.”