That’s just saying your media diet doesn’t cover it. Agencies adjust all the time (every year has a new budget and priorities from Congress), and there was a big Clinton effort which cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and restructured agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
That tends not to get mentioned because it wasn’t disruptive – they actually took time to plan it – and because it happened under a Democratic president, the Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge it.
If we're defining "drawdowns" to mean "hold steady" then sure, lots of those. If it means drawing spending down then there technically was one in the 1940s. The proper terms for what we're seeing are "reallocation" or "expansion" depending on the congress.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181
The big thing, of course, is that total spending is a crude metric lumping discretionary and mandatory spending together. Federal employment has been getting a lot of attention this year, but it's at historic lows and there's no real way to significantly lower total federal spending there without cutting social programs millions of people depend on.
So? That is noise on a flat line. A drawdown doesn't mean sticking to the consensus flat trend. The plan here seems to be a "drawdown" is something where I can say "spending will be about the same".
If I talk about increasing government spending I can point to spending growing from 3% -> 20% GDP with a really clear trend and level change. When we talk about drawdowns it is supposed to mean maintaining a trend at 20%? That isn't a drawdown. If that is a drawdowne then DOGE may turn out to have successfully drawn down US government spending! Even though spending seems to be going up.
US Federal spending over any recent time period is basically sum(GDP over however many years)*20%. You're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that, which likely at no point involved actually lowering spending since we're talking a % of something that is growing.
Y'know, well done Clinton and all that - balancing a budget is challenge. But if that is going to get called a drawdown it was about as effective as DOGE. It didn't bump Federal spending off the trendline and the small amounts render it largely meaningless in the big picture. It is literally statistical noise.
> Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome.
I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.