DOGE’s cuts likely to fall short.

All of the other programs you hear about (schools, welfare payments, foreign aid, medical research) make up roughly 30 percent of the federal budget. Trump would have to eliminate all of those to balance the budget without touching the programs he has deemed untouchable.

Trump and Musk claim they can eliminate most of the deficit by downsizing the federal work force — the Times is tracking the firings here — and ending waste and fraud. This is the work DOGE says it’s doing. But these efforts, too, are likely to fall short.

Presidents and Congress have launched many initiatives over the past few decades to tackle waste and fraud. They did not find significant savings. Watchdogs also track improper payments, which include fraud, duplicate charges and payments to ineligible recipients. These made up $149 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Even if DOGE managed to root out all of these payments — a difficult task for many technical reasons, The Wall Street Journal reported — it would shrink the deficit by only 8 percent.

Similarly, shrinking the federal work force can do only so much. Even if Musk managed to fire every civilian employee and cut their benefits — an outlandish scenario — he would reduce the deficit by just 14 percent.

Some layoffs could even increase the deficit. The Biden administration wanted to hire more workers at the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax cheats. Experts said the plan would bring in $2.5 in tax revenue for every $1 spent. Trump wants to get rid of the new employees anyway.

DOGE claims it has slashed $130 billion in spending. But its ledger is filled with errors, my colleagues David Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported. The agency has revised its estimate downward multiple times, in acknowledgments of mistakes.

In the end, the debt problem remains what it has long been: Republicans and Democrats refuse to cut popular but expensive federal programs and don’t want to raise taxes on most Americans. As long as that’s true, the federal government will remain in the red.

Related: Musk has made sweeping claims about fraud in government spending. Read a fact-check.

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A Paris court found the French far right leader Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement. This endangers her plans to run for president in 2027.

The chair of a charity founded by Prince Harry accused him of harassment and bullying to force her out of her post.

The number of Black men attending four-year colleges has fallen, with a drastic shift at historically Black colleges and universities.

Myanmar Earthquake Death Toll Passes 2,000 as Rescuers Race to Find Survivors - Rescuers raced against fears that the death toll could rise sharply as the end of a 72-hour window in which most people trapped in rubble are reasonably expected to survive neared.

The Wall Street Journal has a worrying report about the ways the administration is coming after the mainstream press with lawsuits and other acts of aggression, like booting The Associated Press from the Oval Office because it won’t refer to the “Gulf of America.”

Bret Stephens: I’m no fan of the college campus protests against Israel, too many of which veered into outright antisemitism. And I think there should be swift and stern consequences for bad conduct, like taking over buildings, bullying other students or lying on immigration forms. On the other hand, the right to speak freely is the most elemental right of all, which we should honor for citizens and noncitizens alike. If the administration can’t offer better reasons for arresting foreign students than not liking their opinion pieces, they should be freed. Anything less is un-American.