The Cuts Didn't Shrink the Deficit. They Redrew the State.

Through August 2025, the federal deficit stood at $1.973 trillion ^[1]. Through September 2026, twelve months that contained the mass layoffs, the buyouts, a shutdown and a war, it stood at roughly $1.8 trillion ^[2]. The snapshots come from different months, so the comparison is not exact. It is still the before-and-after of an enterprise premised on making that number fall. The claimed savings hold up no better under audit. The Government Accountability Office, Congress's audit arm, could not verify 96 percent of them, and the personnel office lacks the data to track savings in the first place. More than 20,000 of the positions the cuts eliminated have already been backfilled. The exercise was not free, either: it cost $9.5 billion in paid administrative leave in 2025, six times the 2023 level, most of it for roughly 140,000 employees paid to resign and not come back ^[3]. Scott Kupor, who runs the Office of Personnel Management, defends the price as an investment that pays for itself.

That 400% return on investment is a massive benefit to the taxpayer. — Scott Kupor

Elon Musk, who led the operation, has described the national debt as basically unfixable ^[1][2]. The deficit measures size, though. Shape is where the year moved, and shape moved by way of one class of tool: emergency executive action, taken in the gaps where Congress gets no vote. In one direction it cut. In the other it spent. Start with the civilian half, in the order its instruments arrived. In February 2025 came an executive order authorizing mass layoffs of roughly 275,000 positions, about 12 percent of the civilian workforce. Lower courts blocked it. The Supreme Court cleared it in July 2025, 8 to 1, an emergency ruling that found the government likely to win while expressing no view on the legality of any agency's actual layoff plan. The lone dissenter, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that the court was releasing the president's wrecking ball and letting one branch aggrandize itself at another's expense ^[4]. Then came the October shutdown, and with it the instrument that showed the design. Standard shutdown practice is to furlough people: send them home unpaid, owing back pay, brought back when it ends. This administration instead issued RIFs, reductions in force, the formal mechanism for eliminating a position outright, terminating more than 4,000 employees across seven agencies while the government was closed ^[5]. The president had been explicit about what a closed government makes possible.

We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. — Donald Trump

The third instrument worked on money rather than people. Under the 1974 Budget Act, a president may ask Congress to rescind, meaning cancel, money it has already voted to spend, and the money freezes for up to 45 days while Congress decides. File the request late enough in the fiscal year and the 45 days outlast the money itself, a maneuver known as a pocket rescission: the spending dies by calendar, without anyone voting. The administration tried it on $4.9 billion in State Department and USAID foreign aid, and lost. An appeals court ordered $11.5 billion released, billions of it for HIV/AIDS programs. Judge Amir Ali's ruling left the administration no room.

Defendants do not have any discretion as to whether to spend the funds. — Amir Ali Hajizadeh

The civilian totals, twenty months in: 332,900 federal civilian jobs gone since January 2025, a 13.6 percent contraction, with USAID's staff cut to almost nothing while the Secret Service and the immigration-enforcement agencies kept hiring ^[6]. The Department of Agriculture lost more than 24,000 people, over a quarter of its staff, between January and December 2025 ^[7]. Up to $177 billion in federal grants has been cut or frozen across all fifty states, nearly a tenth of everything Congress appropriates year to year ^[8]. Much of that money keeps being ordered back. In December 2025, a federal judge ordered $233 million restored to a dozen states stripped of disaster and counterterrorism funds for refusing to help with immigration enforcement ^[9]. In March 2026, a unanimous First Circuit panel found grants still frozen even after the White House withdrew its freeze order ^[10]. Money, though, is the reversible half. A court can order checks cut. It cannot reassemble a workforce that was paid to leave. The irreversible half turned out to be the people, not the funds. The security half moved by the same class of tool, pointed the other way. The war with Iran began on February 28, 2026, launched with Israel and never put to a vote. The War Powers Act of 1973 gives a president 60 days of unauthorized hostilities before the troops must come home. This war's clock ran out on May 1. Congress twice declined to invoke the act itself, while the administration argued that a fragile ceasefire had paused the countdown ^[11][12]. The Congressional Budget Office puts the running cost at $1 billion a day ^[13]. The Pentagon's official estimate came in at $25 billion, mostly munitions, and got called a lowball at the April hearings ^[11]. Iran's foreign minister put the real figure nearer $100 billion.

The Pentagon is lying. — Abbas Araghchi

A Defense Department inspector general's report, out this week, found that Iranian strikes had hit American bases in eight countries, destroyed up to $3.7 billion in equipment including nearly 60 aircraft, killed six American troops, and left what the report called strategic inventory shortfalls and industrial-base bottlenecks for munitions resupply ^[14]. The Pentagon's own calendar had shown the direction even earlier. In September 2025 it spent a record $93.4 billion in a single month, $50.1 billion of it in the last five working days of the fiscal year, the annual use-it-or-lose-it sprint, when unspent appropriations expire and whatever a department fails to spend goes back. Of that five-day burst, $6.6 billion went to foreign governments and businesses ^[15]. The expansion has a hemisphere leg, and it runs on the ground. In March 2026, U.S. Special Forces began supplying intelligence, planning and logistics for joint raids on cartels inside Ecuador ^[16]. In August 2026, Colombia joined the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas coalition as its fourth and largest member, with $1 billion in American security assistance attached and joint operations authorized ^[17]. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has framed the coalition under a revamped Monroe Doctrine, and told defense leaders what that looks like in practice.

Colombia has already requested that the Department of War join Colombia in its fight against narco-terrorism, authorizing joint military operations to destroy terrorist and terror networks. — Pete Hegseth

The newest leg is silicon. An executive order now lists data centers among the nation's critical national-security infrastructure ^[18]. The Pentagon is soliciting private developers to build AI facilities on unused military-base land, starting with 207 acres at Fort Hood ^[19], and the Energy Department has picked four federal sites for the machines, among them the Savannah River and Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons complexes ^[20]. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has set the comparison himself.

By leveraging DOE land assets for the deployment of AI and energy infrastructure, we are taking a bold step to accelerate the next Manhattan Project—ensuring U.S. AI and energy leadership. — Alfie Moon

In one nine-day stretch in July, the government unveiled a one-gigawatt AI data center at Savannah River and a 1.8-gigawatt campus at Paducah, the latter carrying more than $100 billion in projected private investment. Of the two projects announced at gigawatt scale, neither yet has a signed agreement ^[21]. Set the two halves side by side and what matches is the route: both moved through gaps in the appropriations process, the cuts through windows the rules opened and the spending through clocks Congress let run out. The order of events rules out the neat reading: the cutting was underway by early 2025, a full year before the first missiles flew, so the war was not the reason for the cuts. What the war supplied was the frame. By April, the administration was previewing a military budget that suggested cuts to civilian agencies and healthcare to offset its costs ^[12]. The 2027 budget request puts the frame in writing. It proposes a 10 percent cut to non-defense spending, offset by higher defense spending, sets the defense line at $1.5 trillion, and adds a $67 billion supplement to refill what the war burned through, from Patriot interceptors to a Navy operations gap ^[2][22]. No inference required. And the same request asks Congress for a 19 percent increase in discretionary spending, the part of the budget voted on each year, which would be the second-largest such increase in sixty years ^[22].