There have been a lot of budget cuts proposed or already enacted by DOGE, the Trump Administration, and the recent Congressional appropriations bill.
My job, without getting into any more detail, is maybe 50 percent just to listen to people's complaints about this or that program being defunded, and how horrible this will be for children, for low income people, for public health, for this or that endangered animal species, or whatnot. Some of these people are quite vitriolic, and liberally hurl invectives about how "unchristian" it is for Republicans to support these measures. And I always have the same retort (though of course I'm screaming into the void to be heard by nobody), which is "Jesus would open his own wallet".
This is an idea I had the other day: the USFG budget would be divided into two categories: core and peripheral spending. Core spending would cover necessary government functions, such as defense, policing, infrastructure, debt repayments, etc. A sizable chunk of the budget, perhaps a majority of all Federal spending, would fall into this camp. This would be covered by tax revenue just as it is now.
But then the remainder would be classified as peripheral spending. This would not be covered by tax dollars, and it'd take some kind of emergency act of Congress to allocate tax dollars toward government programs of this kind.
A little known fact is that you can make direct monetary donations to the government. Very few people do, but I suspect this is a combination of ignorance and mindset reasons; after all, why make a donation when the whole point of taxes is to cover the government's budget?
But anyway, yes, all dollars allocated toward peripheral spending would be raised by donations. These donations would fall into two types.
First, you could donate to a general fund, which is spent at the government's discretion on peripheral programs. Second, you could donate to a specific program or government agency. Let's say that a small program gets enough in a flash flood of donations (say, because of a viral video by some TikTok influencer) to fund itself for 200 years given current budgetary assumptions about the program. If the program has enough stored up to cover, say, the next 5 years given current budgetary assumptions, then the remainder would automatically be diverted to the general fund. Peripheral programs would be effectively privatized but retain the expertise, institutional guardrails against graft, and name recognition and "official" status of Federal programs (most charitable donations would be directed to them as opposed to many obscure charities with the same purpose, and stand positioned to take advantage of economy of scale much like they do now).
After this, there'd be no more complaining that food stamps was about to get defunded and a bunch of children were about to go hungry, or that Medicaid was about to become a straightforward health insurance program with no subsidies behind it. It'd be as generously funded as the public was generous, subject only to the aforementioned common sense limits (unlikely to be reached for a program of that size anyway). You could no longer pass the buck of your civic responsibility to some rich guy somewhere, or to your unborn grandchildren if said rich guy had the same idea. If those kids went to bed hungry then that would be a moral indictment of you.
