Where this was said
How Clinton Actually Fixed the Budget — and What DOGE Could Have Learned
At 42:20 · chapter starts 38:20
Scaramucci walks through the historical success story DOGE had to hand but ignored. Clinton and Gore's Reinventing Government initiative cut 426,000 government positions through genuine bipartisan consensus and maintained pay-as-you-go fiscal guardrails negotiated originally by George H.W. Bush and OMB director Dick Darman. [1] — Anthony Scaramucci "In the 1990s Clinton and Gore eliminated 426,000 government jobs and adhered to pay-as-you-go fiscal rules, producing a $240 billion surplu…" 41:20 The result: a $240 billion budget surplus by 2000. The method was unglamorous — slow, politically costly (Bush raised taxes and lost re-election partly as a result), and required building buy-in across parties. But it worked. Scaramucci's prescription for today is a 25-year plan: return to pay-as-you-go rules, convene 25-year veterans of the GAO and former budget officials from both parties, document all the tricks agencies use to inflate their budgets, and gradually ratchet spending down. Kay adds the political reality: without bipartisan cooperation, any party that tries to fix this gets destroyed by opposition ads about death panels and stolen senior benefits. The result is a perpetual standoff and a $50 trillion deficit on the horizon.
DOGE cut malaria and Ebola research grants as part of its international-development purge. Now the State Department is trying to rebuild exactly those programmes after realising they protect Americans too. The cost of rehiring will be double the original budget, Katty Kay's daughter witnessed this firsthand.
In the 1990s Clinton and Gore eliminated 426,000 government jobs and adhered to pay-as-you-go fiscal rules, producing a $240 billion surplus by 2000. The formula was boring, bipartisan, and it worked — the exact opposite of DOGE's theatrical chainsaw approach.
Under Clinton and Gore's 'Reinventing Government' initiative, 426,000 government positions were eliminated through bipartisan consensus.
The US is on course for a $50 trillion budget deficit with no political will for the fix. The likely outcome: inflation as a stealth tax. Scaramucci says politicians would rather quietly drain your bank account than tell you the truth about what it will take to correct course.
