There’s a lot of fat to cut in absolute terms but in relative terms it doesn’t matter. In 2018 the federal budget was $4.1 trillion. $2.5 trillion was social security, Medicare/Medicaid, and unemployment. Of the rest, 650 billion was on defense contracting and the other $650 was every other gov’ts program (nasa at $20bn, state department at $44bn every other federal agency, farm subsidies at $10-$20bn, etc etc).
Getting rid of everything but defense spending wouldn’t even dent the growth in entitlement spending, only cutting benefits will fix the issue.
The first thing that needs to be done is for politicians to stop lying to the American public by intentionally using deceptive numbers when discussing our situation. They divide the budget into two categories - discretionary and non-discretionary spending.
Democrats always talk about the percentage of the budget that goes to defense by dividing it by one of the two categories rather than the sum of two categories as the denominator and yet the percentages for their pet projects are always given with the proper denominator as the sum of discretionary and non-discretionary spending resulting in what appears to be a smaller percentage of total spending when in fact their projects are a much more significant percentage of total spending.
They never discus non-discretionary items ( entitlements ) because they are off the table ( sacrosanct third rails of politics by design ) and then falsely claim that defense is a much larger percent of the total budget than it is.
Defense is categorized as discretionary spending when it is in fact one of the primary obligations of the Federal Government where as the justification for “Entitlements” can't be found anywhere in the Constitution except for some nebulous interpretation of the “General Welfare” clause.
It's a fine mess they have gotten us into.