Deep State and Big Debt: America's Self-Inflicted Strategic Threat

Austin Bay on Feb 19, 2025

The political hacks opposing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are laughable -- until you realize these hysterics present a serious threat to U.S. national security.

President Dwight Eisenhower's no longer with us, but we have his National Security Council 162/2 report, dated Oct. 30, 1953. Once top secret, it's now on the internet.

Ike's West Point gut told him America faced a long and dreary strategic siege, and to pay for the win, we needed wealth -- meaning a long-term productive and growing economy.

Give Harry Truman all-American props. Ike's analytic report clarified, expanded and operationalized the Truman administration's NCS-68, which framed the containment strategy that ultimately won The Cold War.

Ike's NSC-162/2 stated that defeating the Soviet Union required the "maintenance of a sound, strong and growing economy" that would underpin U.S. power for "the long pull" of the Cold War.

The long pull: economically and politically strangle the Soviet Union (the Russian Empire in communist garb) behind a dominating military shield. Integrated U.S. and allied economic, political and military power would systemically defeat Russian imperialism while avoiding nuclear holocaust.

The long pull took four-plus decades, with Koreas, Vietnams and Cubas. But the U.S. prevailed.

Credit Ike for demanding America create the wealth to support the long pull.

Our crippled 21st-century situation: America's economic edge has eroded.

President Donald Trump intends to rectify that. Hence, DOGE is fighting a very serious enemy that threatens American security: Big Debt.

Big Debt's threat isn't new. In August 2010, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, echoing Eisenhower, told CNN that "... the most significant threat to our national security is our debt." Because the ability to arm, man and train a first-rate defense force is "directly related to the health of our economy over time."

In 2013 (when debt was $17 trillion), the following paragraph appeared in one of my columns: "America's debt burden has been a looming national security threat for decades, though one that defied headline writers. Because it doesn't drop bombs, Big Debt could not be framed as an immediate crisis. Its danger is long-term. Moreover, the enemy driving Big Debt is problematic. To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo cartoon character, the enemy -- he is us."

The 2025 correction, with debt at $36-plus trillion: The enemy isn't the American public, though as a whole we are responsible for electing grifter Senate and House representatives who want to buy constituencies instead of protect the nation. The cure for their threat is election defeat.

2022's hyperinflation and government budget excess exacerbated Washington's debt problem. Now inflation is embedded in all U.S. economic action, to include military preparedness. Did Joe Biden do it? Yes.

But he did it in league with a criminal enemy: America's embedded bureaucratic state, an unelected and predominantly Democratic Party caste addicted to self-serving, reckless spending and -- until the Trump administration's DOGE -- immune to audit.

Defense is the federal government's Job No. 1. Defense takes money. It takes money to make war and deter war. It takes money to create modern weapons, train and maintain modern warfighters and police-security forces.

In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the Navy's next generation nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) would cost $5.5 billion apiece. Alas, the November 2024 estimate was $6.2 billion. Does America need them? America and the free world need them because Communist China is a real enemy and the Pacific Fleet desperately needs them.

On Feb. 18, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent surmised DOGE had already saved $50 billion -- roughly a nuclear attack sub.

On Feb. 17, DOGE claimed that its analysts had found an estimated total savings of $55 billion. Nine or 10 SSNs -- wasted on political crap.

The real killer: a DOGE post on X (formerly Twitter) reported a total of $4.7 trillion worth of payments from the Treasury Department are "almost impossible" to trace because of missing account identification codes.

Lack of Treasury Access Symbols (TAS) makes tracing payments very difficult.

Incompetence? Criminal theft?

The current U.S. defense budget is between $850 billion to $900 billion.

The unelected bureaucratic state has lost track of five defense budgets.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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