White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt once again pushed back on media and Democrat complaints about President Donald Trump’s efforts to dramatically cut federal spending through recommendations made to him by Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk and his team.
Leavitt referenced past video clips of Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all championing dramatic spending cuts, though only one of them — Clinton, along with a GOP-controlled Congress — managed to cut spending enough to balance the federal budget for a couple of years.
“To all of the Democrats who are planning to protest this week, here’s an explanation on DOGE, from your party’s own beloved leaders!” Leavitt posted on the X platform along with a video clip of Obama and Biden citing the need for cuts.
Separately, other X users posted video clips of Clinton introducing massive cuts to the federal workforce and overall spending, which amounted to trillions in savings and balanced budgets during his two terms.
The X account KanekoaTheGreat summarized the Clinton-era plan and its positive effects on the country:
Facing a ballooning deficit and mounting inefficiencies, Clinton announced an ambitious plan to slash wasteful spending, shrink bureaucracy, and rein in government overreach. He signed an executive order eliminating 100,000 federal jobs, a 12% cut in administrative costs, and the consolidation or termination of hundreds of outdated programs.
One of his biggest warnings? If wasteful spending wasn’t controlled, the federal deficit would soar to $650 billion per year by the early 2000s, with a growing share of tax dollars going toward interest payments on debt instead of public investment.
Fast forward to today. In 2024, the federal deficit stands at $1.83 trillion—nearly triple Clinton’s worst-case scenario. Interest on the debt alone has reached $880 billion, consuming an ever-larger portion of the national budget.
Clinton’s reforms worked during his presidency. The federal workforce shrank by 380,000 federal jobs—a 16% decrease. Programs were streamlined, waste was reduced, and deficits were brought under control.
In a column for the Washington Examiner, Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) chastised Democrats and their media allies now complaining about the Trump-Musk cost-cutting initiative, reminding them that their party was all in favor of streamlining government spending until the current president undertook the effort.
“The United States is $36 trillion in debt, and Washington, D.C., continues to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars. Instead of efficiency, people have gotten an ever-growing bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer dollars and is unaccountable to the public,” he began.
“This is exactly why President Donald Trump’s initiative to implement the Department of Government Efficiency represents a bold step toward draining the bureaucratic swamp, forcing federal agencies to streamline, modernize, and justify their spending,” Webster continued. “But the biggest irony of the backlash against DOGE is who is leading the resistance.”
He noted that DOGE is actually a derivative of the United States Digital Service, which was created by Obama in 2014.
“For years, Democrats praised it. They had no problem when Obama and Joe Biden’s USDS embedded Silicon Valley insiders deep in our federal agencies, including giving engineers access to Medicare’s mainframe, which processes billions of dollars in payments every year,” Webster wrote.
The USDS expanded into a bloated bureaucracy with little oversight, yet its access to sensitive government systems was never questioned because its agenda aligned with the Democratic Party, he explained. Now, with Trump rebranding USDS as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and appointing one of the most visionary innovators of our time, Elon Musk, to overhaul Washington’s inefficiencies, the same individuals who once championed USDS are now rallying in protest outside the Treasury Department, he added.
“The same people who let USDS tinker with Medicare’s billion-dollar payment system now want to block Trump from cutting waste,” said Webster.