Despite promising to slash costs, Donald Trump has spent an eye-watering amount in his first 100 days back in the White House, compared to the same period last year.
Trump returned to the White House for a second term in January, promising for wholesale changes and cuts.
The 47th POTUS has signed countless executive orders, including renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and a bill eradicating the Department of Education – something which has seen developments in court earlier this week.
Trump even appointed Elon Musk to head up the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut unnecessary government spending.
The department claims to have saved $170 billion so far due to various government cuts, which the site says is a ‘combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions’.
These figures are yet to be verified.
But stats put together by CBS News suggest Trump’s administration has splashed out $220 billion more in his first 100 days compared to the same period last year under the Biden administration.
Crunching the numbers on data from when Trump returned to the Oval Office in January up until April 29, his 100th day as president, CBS found the government is spending more now than it has been in the last 10 years.
The only exception being 2021, which is of course when the Covid-19 pandemic brought the whole world to a halt and the US was spending trillions to fight the coronavirus and prevent an economic downfall.
So, where is Trump spending the dollar?
Well, a large portion of it comes through Medicare and social security benefit payments, which have both seen an increase of over $37 billion in spending compared to the same period under Biden last year.
Interest on Treasury Securities, Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture have also seen huge investments in the past few months.
People have been left stunned by the figures, with one person penning on YouTube: “So much for the government spending cuts.”
In a bid to save money, mass layovers have taken place across many governmental departments, including education.
Trump has described the mass firings as a way of ‘getting rid of the fat’ that the country is ‘riddled’ with.
“We’re getting down to a point we think probably over the next two or three months, we’ll be pretty much satisfied with the people that are working hard and want to be members of the administration and our country,” he said at the end of March, The Independent reported.
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