Musk gets ready to cut trillions from US budget - UK might follow the lead
Trump picks **Elon Musk** to lead new government spending-cut department. His target: slice $2 trillion from federal budget‚ while UK faces similar waste-management issues in public sector
Elon Musk made his stance crystal-clear on social media platform X about government spending: its making inflation worse and needs to stop. The tech-savvy billionaire (now head of the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency) thinks he can trim about $2 trillion from US federal spending
The move comes as part of president-elect Donald Trumpʼs quick post-election decisions; however many budget experts arent sure about such big cuts. Still‚ if Musk pulls this off – it might change how other countries deal with their spending
In Britain the situation looks quite similar: public spending has gone up-and-up since the pandemic started reaching almost 45% of the economy (which is way more than 5 years ago). The civil service got bigger by 129k workers in less than a decade; meanwhile public sector work gets done slower than before
Every year billions of pounds are spent on programmes we have never evaluated
The UK faces some real-world problems with this approach:
- High-speed rail costs 8.5x more than in France
- Public projects often run late and over-budget
- Tax rates keep climbing while services decline
- Government computer systems need updates
Lord Maude who led cost-cutting during coalition times saved £52bn over 5 years: “You could do the same again but lots has gone backwards since then“. He made civil service smaller by 21% and fixed many bad contracts
The Treasury doesnt help much – they dont care about smaller amounts according to Lord Maude: “They wont get out of bed for less than £100m“. This kind of thinking makes it hard to stop waste
Recent attempts to fix things havenʼt worked well. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg had just 7 months as efficiency minister – not enough time to make real change. He thinks they could cut “at least 100k“ civil service jobs
Some experts say UK should follow Musks example and bring in business leaders like former Tesco chiefs to shake things up. If the US manages to cut spending without breaking things it might force Britain to follow suit
