Hardly bankrupt, but: none of this is going to make a difference without cutting into the big pie of military spending which is pork-barreled to individual constituencies. Or the large amount spent on retirees because they're an important class of voters who have no employment income. Or putting up taxes.

Under Clinton the US was running a surplus. When Bush came in he passed huge tax cuts and turned it into a deficit instead.

This whole framing is nonsense. The US is the reserve currency of the world, and its influence in both economic and soft power has had massive ROI for the entire economy for decades. There is no other government that plays this role in the global economy, and it's a ridiculously advantageous one. The fact that a balance sheet shows the sum of the investments to achieve and maintain that as a deficit is not a reason to freak out, this is a drastic misunderstanding of how nation-scale economics work that comes from people who are only familiar with household and business budgets

But if we were concerned about the budget, contractors are drastically more expensive than federal agencies and are much more dubious in their value proposition for the state or the public. It's just that the people involved made their fortunes on cushy government contracts and corporate welfare, so they won't go after it. The whole "fiscal conservatism" concept has always been a massive grift and this is the most blatant and obvious it's ever been

And you're absolutely right in saying that the Democrats are on the same grift, as their strategy has shifted to triangulation in the last 40 years, though the economic shocks they tend to produce over this insanity are generally smaller. The fact is, neoliberal economics has failed to produce widespread domestic prosperity, was likely an attempt to loot modern economies for an oligarch class from the beginning, and people keep accepting doubling down on these policies because they've been systematically misinformed about economic cause and effect through trite little analogies

Congress found $2.7 trillion (with a T) in improper payments from Medicaid and Medicare over the last 20 years. This was Congress, not even DOGE, at work (finally), and the yelling and screaming is still over "you can't look at that data!"

They can, they should, and there needs to be an actual clean up, not a "we're totally doing it, honest, Scout's honor!" like we've seen from the last 30 years worth of administrations (and yes, I know who's included in that span :) ).

Trump added $8.4T to the national deficit as a president during (mostly) good times. Biden added $4.3T to the national deficit as a president during challenging times.