By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | October 11, 2025
Yesterday, we came across a Wall Street Journal article titled: “Tariffs Are Way Up. Interest on Debt Tops $1 Trillion. And DOGE Didn’t Do Much.”
The Journal based its report on a Congressional Budget Office report released earlier in the week.
But I&I readers knew all this months ago.
Because while Democrats and the mainstream press were freaking out about how the Department of Government Efficiency was slashing government, we were reporting the facts.
Back in February, we debunked the claim that Elon Musk was taking a chainsaw to the federal government (see “Musk Is ‘Shredding’ Government? Not Even Close”), lies spread by the mainstream media that fueled terrorist attacks on Tesla owners and dealers. We noted that the job cuts were minuscule compared to the mammoth size of the federal workforce, and that the spending cuts announced by that point were almost imperceptible next to a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit.
In March, we explained that the media conveniently left out one key fact from all their DOGE freakout stories – namely, that the national debt was exploding (“One Fact Missing From Every DOGE Story.”)
“Democrats and the press don’t want the public to know just how dire the nation’s fiscal situation is,” we said, because if people “knew just how bad things were, support for deep spending cuts would only increase.”
In June, while the mainstream press was filling pages and airwaves with horror stories about spending cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, we told readers the truth (“Let’s Be Honest, The ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ Doesn’t Cut Spending At All”) and in July we debunked claims of “historic” cuts to Medicaid (“One Chart To Kill The Medicaid Lies For Good.”)
In August, we dug into the Treasury Department’s monthly spending and revenue report and showed that spending in July was $55.5 billion higher than the year before.
What’s more, there were jumps for outlays for agencies such as Veterans Affairs (up $3 billion year-over-year), Medicaid (up $15 billion), the EPA (up $195 million), the National Science Foundation (up $14 million) – all of which were supposedly being slashed and burned.
In fact, just five of the 15 Cabinet-level agencies spent less this July than they did last year.
These data were easily available to reporters all along, but most decided instead to parrot Democratic talking points. They were actively misleading their readers.
Now these same news outlets are acting surprised that spending hasn’t been cut while the national debt continues to grow at unsustainable rates.
For the rest of us, it’s one more reason to distrust anything the mainstream press reports these days.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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