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Media outlets continue to report that Elon Musk and his DOGE colleagues are aggressively slashing and burning their way through the Beltway bureaucracy. Sadly for taxpayers, the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office keep telling a different story. Specifically, CBO’s monthly updates consistently show Washington on the same unsustainable spending bender that it’s been on for years. CBO reports today: The federal budget deficit totaled $1.1 trillion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Adjusting for some shifts in the timing of payments, that sad ocean of red ink is $123 billion larger than the shortfall at this time last year. This means another year of an annual federal deficit that approaches $2 trillion. Federal spending continues to increase at a rate of about 7% compared with the same period last year, so there’s no austerity in Washington. Obviously it’s well past time for Congress to start sending real cuts to the
president’s desk but instead congressional appropriators have been whining about White House suggestions of even modest restraint. It’s not going to get easier. CBO notes a few of the items driving spending higher in the first seven months of the 2025 fiscal year compared to the same period in fiscal 2024:
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