Red Ink Republicans

Fiscal year 2025 closes the books, and the books don’t close. Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House. The deficit doesn’t check party registration.

CBO’s own historical ledger shows it: the federal government spent $7.010 trillion in FY2025 and collected $5.235 trillion in revenue — a $1.775 trillion hole. Next year’s forecast isn’t a correction, it’s a continuation: CBO’s ten-year projections put FY2026 outlays at $7.449 trillion against a deficit of $1.853 trillion — 5.8% of GDP — with debt held by the public climbing to 100.6% of GDP. The economy is about to owe more than it’s worth in a year.

The administration’s answer was supposed to be DOGE. Reuters tallied the unit’s own claimed contract savings in February 2025 at $8.5 billion — about one-eighth of one percent of what the government spends in a single year. Run the math forward and it would take more than 800 years of DOGE-pace cuts to offset one year of the FY2025 deficit.

Even that number doesn’t survive contact with an audit. GAO went through DOGE’s self-published “Wall of Receipts” — $110 billion in claimed savings — and found $27.4 billion of it traces to 2,503 listed contracts on which no termination action was ever taken. GAO didn’t call the whole total fake. It called the receipts what they were: savings estimates that are “incorrect or lack supporting evidence.”

Meanwhile the government went shopping. This isn’t the TARP playbook — that 2008 program authorized $700 billion, actually disbursed $443.5 billion, and collected back $425.5 billion, landing at a lifetime cost of about $31.1 billion with a built-in exit. In October 2025 the Department of Defense took a 10% equity stake in Trilogy Metals, the Department of Energy took a 5% equity stake in Lithium Americas — a Canadian company — and the DOD had already become the largest stakeholder in MP Materials, the operator of the nation’s only rare earth mine. No wind-down date. No emergency to point to. Just ownership.

And here’s the reveal: the whole deficit story was supposed to have a release valve. On November 9, 2025, the president promised a dividend of at least $2,000 a person, funded by tariff revenue, paying down the $37 trillion national debt along the way. Sen. Josh Hawley filed a narrower version — $600, or a tariff-tied amount, whichever is greater — and it has sat in committee ever since, never advancing. Then, on February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled the administration couldn’t impose those tariffs under IEEPA in the first place. CBO now estimates 2026 tariff and customs revenue will land $250 billion — 60% — below earlier projections, with roughly $100 billion already issued in refunds. The revenue that was supposed to fund the check the government already promised doesn’t exist anymore.

Zoom out and it’s the same shape every time: borrow against a number that isn’t there yet, spend before the audit lands, take an ownership stake nobody voted on, and bet the payoff on a court that hasn’t ruled. The deficit isn’t a talking point. It’s the one number in this episode that didn’t need a press release to be real.