As President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency looks for places to cut spending and shrink the bureaucracy, a Cato Institute federal budget expert suggests looking to the $181 billion a year spent on “corporate welfare.”

“Corporate welfare means business subsidies,” said Chris Edwards, who is an advocate for smaller government.

Edwards and Cato, a libertarian-leaning think tank, have a new report out this week that details reasons to cut the so-called corporate welfare.

He said federal government business subsidies burden taxpayers, misallocate resources, displace markets, expand the bureaucracy and have other detrimental impacts.

Edwards offered a dozen reasons in his report for the government to cut the subsidies.

“Many other American entrepreneurs and businesses, they battle every day,” he said. “They pay their taxes. They don’t get subsidies. So, I don’t think the farmer should get the subsidies. I don’t think the semiconductor companies should get the subsidies. I don’t think the broadband companies should get the subsidies.”

Edwards said the subsidies breed a sense of unfairness and corruption.

But the most compelling reason to cut the subsidies is the $36 trillion federal debt, he said.

“We have a federal budget crisis, massive deficits,” Edwards said. “We’ve got to cut not just sort of the pure waste that the DOGE folks are finding. I think we’ve got to cut some of these programs where there are alternate sources of funding.”

This isn’t a new issue for America, he said.

The U.S. government subsidized businesses occasionally in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, including railroads.

“But the difference then was that these subsidies were either temporary or they ended up not working very well, and Congress repealed them,” Edwards said. “I think what is new now is that we have this accumulation of subsidies over time, and then Congress never reassesses and repeals any of them.”

Both Republicans and Democrats back government subsidies, Edwards said.

“The subsidies are absolutely a bipartisan problem,” he said. “Farm subsidies are a good example of this. They have gotten Republican and Democratic party backing ever since the 1930s.”

Edwards said the government pumps out tens of billions of dollars every year on farm subsidies that he said largely go to big farming corporations and wealthy people.

And some subsidies that might’ve been meant to help fledgling industries get off the ground have dragged on for decades, he said.

The government has been subsidizing solar power since the 1970s and broadband since the 1990s.

Republicans might be angry about some of the green energy subsidies from former President Joe Biden, Edwards said.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included around $1 trillion over 10 years of both tax credits and spending subsidies for green energy, he said.

“Democrats constantly and correctly complain that there is a lot of waste and fraud and excessive payment in federal government Pentagon procurement,” Edwards said. “The Pentagon spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on defense contractors. Those contracts are notoriously wasteful. There’s frequently cost overruns on big weapon systems.”

Amtrak should be privatized, he argued.

And American airports should be self-funded, he said. Airports are self-funded in Canada and Britain, he noted.

“In the end, a lot of times the subsidies don’t do companies any good,” Edwards said.

Ford is losing money on subsidized electric vehicle manufacturing, he said.

Another example is solar panel maker Solyndra, which went bankrupt in 2011 and left taxpayers with the bill for a failed $535 million federal loan guarantee.

“The companies get them, they get sort of lazy, they get bloated, and they take their eye off the ball of what their customers really want,” Edwards said.

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