As President Donald Trump continues to empower the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to identify wasteful spending taking place in the federal government, a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report announced that the budget deficit for 2025 is projected to be $1.9 trillion, and by 2035 is expected to grow to $2.7 trillion. DOGE has pledged to recommend $2 trillion in budget cuts by July 4, 2026.

Last month, the CBO released its “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035,” finding that by 2035, the national debt (currently at $36 trillion) is expected to balloon to $52 trillion, which will be approximately 118% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Meanwhile, Trump has declared that he will direct DOGE, headed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, to continue zeroing in on government expenditures to cut across numerous federal agencies. The Epoch Times reported last week that DOGE has so far scrutinized the Treasury Department, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

In an interview on Sunday, Trump stated that he would soon give DOGE authorization to probe the Department of Education and the military. “We’re going to find billions — hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” the president predicted. So far, DOGE has reported to have targeted $36.69 billion in federal spending to cut on its unofficial tracking website, which amounts to 1.8% of its $2 trillion goal.

“I’m very proud of the job that this group of young people ... [are] doing,” Trump said last week, in reference to DOGE. “They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”

On Friday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” former Congressman Dave Brat gave a frank assessment of the fiscal situation the U.S. currently finds itself in.

“We’re roughly stealing from our own children, right? That’s how bad it is,” he shook his head. “… We’re running $2 trillion deficits right now — that’s the amount of debt you go into each year. … [I]f you run $2 trillion deficits for 10 years, you add another $20 trillion in debt to the already existing $30 trillion in debt. … We printed $9 trillion, which created the inflation you got. That’s another hidden tax of 25% on the value of your dollar over the past five years, so 25% loss of your purchasing power over the past five years. And the deficits are going to government spending, and they’re counting government spending as part of economic growth.”

Brat continued, “So just to put that in perspective, it’s like you are borrowing from your rich uncle $2 trillion and then telling your neighbors, ‘My firm is growing by $2 trillion today.’ Right, because you borrowed from your uncle. That’s not growth, and everybody knows that’s not real growth. … You just went into debt. So this is a total disaster.”

Brat, who currently serves as senior vice president of Business Relations at Liberty University, went on to argue that the economic outlook for the country is grim unless Congress takes more severe actions to cut spending.

“According to Robert Gordon at Northwestern University … our productivity has been going down in the U.S. for the past 70 years, and now it’s at 2%,” he explained. “And if you look at those CBO reports … we’re going to grow at 2% for the next 10 years as well — you grow at roughly your productivity growth. So the people that [say], ‘We’re going to grow our way out of this.’ … I wish it were [true]. I would say it paints a pretty bleak picture. … I have productivity going down from 1.9% to 1.5% over the next 10 years. So we’re in debt up to our eyeballs. Congress seems incapable of doing anything right. They just [announced] they’re going to cut $300 billion over 10 years. That’s $30 billion a year. That’s like a teaspoon.”

Brat concluded by expressing hope in the new Trump administration’s “positive energy” toward reform and its stated willingness to rely on God.

“The good news is President Trump [on Thursday] at the prayer breakfast [said], ‘[F]rom the earliest days of our republic, faith in God has always been the ultimate source of strength and beats in the heart of our nation.’ … [T]here is a turnaround in this country spiritually, psychologically, there’s positive energy. Again, we’re not scared. Markets will be less fearful of doing the right things instead of all these crazy initiatives. And so, there is good news. I think the kids are waking up to this stuff, and so there’s a glimmer there.”