Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump have lofty goals for the federal government, including a comprehensive overhaul of its operations and finances.
Musk, the richest person in the world and the owner of multiple businesses, has cautioned that his plans, which include reducing federal expenditure by at least $2 trillion, may result in “temporary hardship” before bringing about “long-term prosperity.” His statements are making many federal employees and those who rely on the federal government for support or their livelihood shudder, while also making budget specialists laugh.
Details about how the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will operate – and how Musk and his co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy will avoid conflicts of interest – remain scarce. But the duo has spoken openly about areas of the government they’d like to see altered, while Trump and Republican lawmakers have a long list of programs and operations they’d like to reform.
It’s important to note that while Trump has promised that the initiative will make “drastic changes,” Musk and Ramaswamy will not have any direct power to make spending cuts, regulatory changes or other moves. The group will exist outside of the government and will likely serve to make recommendations to the White House for the president’s annual budget, which outlines the president’s vision but Congress is not required to follow.
Asked at a town hall on X last month about what the initiative’s first steps would be, Musk said there is so much government waste that it would be easy to find targets. “We, just as a country, obviously, we need to live within our means,” said Musk, who owns X and is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. “So that means just looking at every line item, every expense and saying, ‘Is this necessary at all?’”
But he also acknowledged that “everyone’s taking a haircut here.” “That necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity,” said Musk. Musk also took aim at the Department of Education, a frequent target of Trump and Republicans, criticizing the agency for allegedly indoctrinating kids with left-wing propaganda and other failings. However, he did not call for its elimination during the town hall.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and former 2024 Republican presidential candidate who shifted his support to Trump, has been more specific about how he’d change the federal government. On the campaign trail, he said he would get rid of up to 75% of the federal workforce. About 2.3 million civilians are employed by the federal government, with nearly 60% working for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security.
“Hordes of unelected bureaucrats stifle innovation and ignore the voted desires of the American people,” Ramaswamy wrote in a white paper. The plan also called for closing the Education Department and shifting its workforce training programs to the Labor Department; eliminating the FBI and relocating its 15,000 special agents who solve cases to other agencies; and getting rid of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and shifting its duties to other departments.
Rooting out waste in the government is “a huge undertaking,” said Stephen Moore, an economic campaign adviser to Trump and a Heritage Foundation economist. “DOGE is going to need hundreds of people to pull this off. It won’t just be Elon and Vivek,” said Moore, who is not involved in the effort.The law has strict transparency mandates requiring, among other things, advance notice of meetings, that meetings are publicly accessible and that the public has a view into what records a commission is using to do its work. It also requires that a commission’s members are not all of the same viewpoint.
“The idea that you can just say, ‘I am going to give my two wealthy friends the power to reshape government and they can do it in secret,’ that’s not how it works,” said Harry Sandick, another lawyer who sued the Trump voter fraud commission on behalf of a Democratic commissioner who said he was cut out of the commission’s work.
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