Importantly, spending has not dropped under Trump:
And:
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.
The only real path that actually works is going to be to tax the rich.
My stance on fixing the debt has long been that the only answer is to invest in robust social programs. Such social programs pretty much always increase economic activity, which the government gets to collect taxes on every step of the way. Of course that only works if such investment exists and the government is willing to collect those taxes, neither of which seem to be the case anymore.