Well, howdy there, Internet people.

It's Bell again.

So today, we're going to talk about Trump, budget mistakes, and cutting costs.

Recently, we talked about how cutting costs to cut costs and looking for a meme-worthy number

would lead to mistakes, and that the important thing is to look for efficiency, and then

the cuts will come naturally. I got a lot of pushback on that idea. Well, let's just say it didn't

take long for a case study in looking for meme-worthy numbers and it causing a problem to show up.

So, the social media account for Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency

posted a link to a Congressional Budget Office report, along with this statement.

Quote, in fiscal year 2024, U.S. Congress provided $516 billion to programs whose authorizations

previously expired under federal law. Nearly $320 billion of that $516 billion expired more

than a decade ago. It was retweeted by one of Trump's chief efficiency experts,

Vivek Ramoswamy, who added, quote, if the spending isn't authorized, then we shouldn't be

spending it. That shouldn't be controversial. Shouldn't be controversial, huh?

Okay, so first, let's talk about how programs end up with expired authorizations.

Basically, Congress authorizes a program for a set number of years, and by the time it expires, people in Congress don't know.

So they continue to appropriate money for it.ires, people in Congress don't know, so they continue to appropriate

money for it, normally because the program is something that it just seems like should be

funded. But maybe they're wrong. The comments under Ramoswami's post were in almost universal

agreement with the idea that the spending should be cut. But see,

I did something they didn't. I opened the report. Then I laughed. So here are some of the very

non-controversial cuts that would be made if they just cut all of the programs that have expired

...