>1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government. The executive must have full authority to examine all data produced by itself.
The people should educate themselves then. The way to reduce the budget is to elect different congresspeople. We did this in the 90s. It sure is funny how insistent all these people are that we can't just do what we've done before. Are they children who didn't live through the deficit hawk era?
2. "Their claim is impossible, but if they did it, that would be great"
4. "However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data."
SS payouts ARE NOT based on age, but "eligibility", which age is an input to. The government purposely keeps very gentle records on it's citizens because once we saw a country keep really good records on it's people and then Bad Things happened, and also stuff about the mark of the beast. More importantly, the government takes a light touch to data integrity because the data doesn't matter. If you say you are eligible for benefits, the data says no, you can verify your eligibility a lot of ways and the data does not get updated, because we aren't supposed to be a surveillance state like that. If you want to update your records with the government, you can contact the Social Security admin and do it that way. One of the things Social Security pays out for is Ex Spouses, and that includes Abusive Ex Spouses. Your Abusive Ex I'm sure would love if the SS admin had accurate records about where they can find you. This is a legitimate concern that people working in government have had to address regularly.
5. Define significant. "Everyone thinks X" is a stupid heuristic when ONLY 47% of the country can even name the three branches of government. I don't care what Tim or Sasha think of medicare fraud, I care what GAO or an AG say about medicare fraud.
6. “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. Nope. Sometimes you just cannot recognize the breaks right away. The stricken vessel can keep going for quite some time before fully sinking. Cutting until shit breaks means you have to figure out what else is broken but not obviously so
And all this nonsense is shattered anyway when the basic premise of "Reducing the debt" is horseshit, which you can see from the tax plan being pushed.