As I said in the beginning, "feel free to disagree", so thanks for taking me up on that. As for coming across as one-sided, I didn't feel the need to represent both sides - I don't think I can fairly represent your point of view, and that's the value in having a discussion after all. However, I disagree with your implication that my viewpoint is partisan. Truth is neither Democratic nor Republican. If the facts line up on one side, then perhaps one side is right on a particular issue (while they could still be wrong on another issue). Again, feel free to disagree about what the facts are, but let's not make this about partisanship.

As to your response, I'll try to describe your points and then reply. Let me know if I mischaracterized anything you said.

1. Spending cuts shouldn't necessarily be a small-d democratic exercise.

Yes, they should. I am well aware that the President is the chief of the executive branch and its agencies. On the other hand, these agencies are also established by laws passed by Congress (e.g., the Department of Education was established by a 1979 law [1]). Sure, judges can rule on the division of powers; judges can also issue injunctions to halt what the administration is trying to do, until it has had time to consider its rulings. In the meantime, DOGE is still in government servers, and it's not even clear to me if DOGE will always follow court orders.

And for the purposes of discussion, instead of solely appealing to the future authority of the courts, we can also reason about what happens if all of this is deemed constitutional. If Congress can establish agencies, through laws signed by the Nth president, but the N+1-th president can simply ignore Congress and tell the agency to cease and desist... what exactly is the role of Congress?

And pray tell, why can't spending cuts be a democratic exercise? Trump is a democratically elected president with a House and Senate controlled by his own party. He can absolutely pass spending cuts that are agreed to by Congress, especially given that no congress member in the Republican party seems to have any backbone to stand up against President Trump. Here's my answer: it will be long, drawn out, and politically damaging, because too many people will have a chance to realize what these spending cuts are really taking away. Trump, Musk, and the crew are trying to pull a fast one on the American people, and this kind of anti-democratic maneuver is exactly what the framers were worried about when they wrote the Constitution in the first place.

2. DOGE wants to cut 1B or 10B times 100.

Umm, okay, good luck. Here's a breakdown of YTD US federal spending according to treasury.gov [2]:
- Social security (21%)
- National defense (15%)
- Health (14%)
- Net interest (13%)
- Medicare (13%)
- Income security, i.e., various financial assistance programs for the poor (9%)
- Veteran benefits and services (6%)
- Everything else (9%)

Cut "everything else", and that's ~600B off the budget. Great. See A1 in my original post: that's not going to pay for the tax cut Trump wants. And what do you give up? All science funding? All "education, training, employment, and social services"? (All while AI might start to displace more and more jobs?)

Or should we cut one of the other items? Sure, let's hear some proposals. My original point was, there's a cost-benefit analysis to be made, and DOGE is circumventing that cost-benefit discussion completely undemocratically. Spending 10B or even 100B isn't "too much" or "too little" unless we know what we're buying.

3. You can cut taxes and still trim the deficit.

Sure, please do the math and show me how this is going to happen. Where are $2T in spending cuts going to come from? I can reduce power usage in a datacenter by 50% by randomly unplugging half the machines, but I'm pretty sure that will get me fired. Show me what you think should be cut, and we can have a discussion. And again, why can't this go through a Republican- (and in reality, Trump-) controlled Congress?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Education_Organi...
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...