Less than two weeks after announcing a stunning $5.2 trillion in new U.S.-based investments, the Trump administration commenced its “SelectUSA Investment Summit” earlier this week.
The summit, billed by the Trump administration as the “highest profile event in the United States to facilitate business investment by connecting thousands of investors, companies, economic development organizations, and industry experts to make deals happen,” is, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, key to “bringing in trillions of dollars [more] in new investment into the United States.”
President Trump, the author of The Art of the Deal, knows a thing or two about deals. He’s been using tariffs to create new opportunities for foreign investments with allies like Japan and South Korea, and using the power of the U.S. consumer market to improve how much existing opportunities like Nippon Steel’s proposed purchase of U.S. Steel will benefit American workers.
But Trump also knows that deals can’t happen in a vacuum. That’s, in part, why he created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—to remove dead weight that’s blocking prosperity. A mere 658 words, Executive Order 14158, issued on Trump’s first day back in office, gave the go-ahead to unleash hell against the federal establishment. And barely more than 100 days in, DOGE’s efforts have produced $165 billion in savings. To be clear, that’s $165 billion extracted from the public sector and returned to the private sector.
Somewhat less than half of the savings is the result of:
- 11,654 grant terminations saving $37 billion
- 9,497 contract terminations saving $32 billion
- 592 lease terminations saving $291 million
Meanwhile, DOGE’s aggressive deregulatory efforts have produced $14.7 billion in savings. The remaining $81 billion of savings comes from workforce reductions, asset sales, programmatic changes, improper payment fixes, and interest savings.
Consider DOGE’s impact on the federal workforce. According to Reuters, “In all, over 260,000 federal workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early” since President Trump assumed office. The Trump administration is on course to reduce federal employment by 300,000—a reduction of 12.4%—by year’s end. Should those cuts materialize, “they would rank as the largest reductions to start a new presidency since BLS started tracking federal employment in 1950, exceeding the current record of 195,000 during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first year in 1953.”
Why is this important? By shifting capital and labor from the relatively unproductive public sector to the more productive private sector, DOGE is a) creating opportunities for private investment, b) laying the groundwork for national prosperity, and c) moving bureaucrats out of the way of people’s ability to use their own money.
As Vice President J.D. Vance said the other day, “There’s a lot of criticism that Donald Trump is trying to bring back the jobs of the past. These are the jobs of the future, making American steel, building bridges, and automobiles, homes for American people.”
What’s implicit here is that Vance and Trump know that private investment in manufacturing and America’s future, not government goodies, will propel national prosperity. That’s why they’ve used DOGE to remove dead weight, deregulation to open domestic economic opportunities, and tariff negotiations and partnerships like the SelectUSA Summit to create opportunities for foreign direct investment in the United States.
Nippon Steel’s desire to invest in U.S. Steel is a sterling example. As I noted last week, Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, upped its already substantial offer to buy U.S. Steel and invest in U.S. manufacturing to an estimated $21 billion. U.S. Steel’s CEO, David Burritt, believes President Trump will “see how this [deal] helps make U.S. Steel great again. And frankly, Nippon is going to pay for it.”
The world wants to invest in America. And why not? America offers unlimited potential. Let Nippon Steel and other companies, both foreign and domestic, invest in that potential. Let them invest in America’s future.
Investing in the future requires sacrifice, and the president’s critics will continue to emphasize the pain felt by government employees whose jobs are ending. As President Trump once said, “Nothing is easy, but who wants nothing?”
Following a two-year stint in the White House as an Associate Director of the National Economic Council, James Carter served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and Deputy Undersecretary of Labor for President George W. Bush.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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