President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that two of his most vocal supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Together, these two great Americans will lead my administration on a path to dismantling government bureaucracy, cutting overregulation, reducing wasteful spending, and restructuring our federal agencies,” President Trump said. It's going to open up,” he said. “It could potentially become the 'Manhattan Project' of our time.”
If you're wondering why you've never heard of this division before, it's because it doesn't exist. Despite the misleading name (the executive branch is created only by Congress), President Trump appears to be creating a new Presidential Advisory Council or Task Force simply to provide guidance.
So, at first glance, this committee may seem completely disingenuous. Its acronym “DOGE” is an obvious homage to the meme cryptocurrency that Musk frequently promotes, and the coin's value soared after President Trump's announcement. It is also somewhat ironic that a commission investigating government inefficiency and waste should have two co-chairs instead of one.
But the project isn't just an inside joke; it's also part of President Trump's existing plan to reduce the federal workforce. His campaign called for relocating government workers from Washington, D.C., and slashing civil service jobs. This is an attempt to dismantle what Trump and his allies call the “deep state,” even though these jobs are often necessary to maintain federal programs. Running — and “DOGE” indicates he’s at least starting to put that plan into action.
President Trump did not acknowledge that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is new, nor did he spell out exactly what it would look like. He provided vague details, including how the committee would “provide advice and guidance from outside the government and work with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to advance major structural reforms.” Ta. In other words, while the commission itself is unlikely to have any regulatory authority, there is little doubt that it could influence the next administration and how it decides its budget.
What Musk and Ramaswamy want and why it's dangerous
What this committee will look like and how large it will be remains to be seen, but there is every reason to take seriously the threat it poses. Musk, who represented President Trump during the campaign, promised to find $2 trillion in cuts from the federal government's $6.75 trillion budget. Ramaswamy, who ran against Trump in the Republican primary and later campaigned for him, also called for firing 75% of federal employees and abolishing agencies such as the FBI, IRS and the Department of Education. proposed.
The scale of the cuts would be catastrophic. Musk himself said in October that his plan to cut the federal budget would cause economic turmoil, cause market crashes and “inevitably involve temporary hardship.” Experts also say Musk's $2 trillion figure is not just an aspirational number, and that it would be virtually impossible to cut that much without putting social programs on the chopping block.
“We can't reach the scale of cuts they're spreading unless we water down the things that people really care about and rely on,” Sharon Parrott, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said in an email. said.
As my colleague Eric Levitz has written, if Trump doesn't cut Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending, he will have to cut other government programs by up to 80 percent.
That would include cutting off all social services, food inspections, aviation safety, health insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments for low-income Americans, among other things.
The commission, which President Trump said would be completed within two years, is also fraught with conflicts of interest. Musk's company SpaceX, for example, has more than $10 billion in government contracts, and agencies such as NASA are already overly dependent on it. The federal government has also investigated and filed lawsuits against Musk's companies, and Musk himself has often complained that his companies face too much government oversight. Musk will now advise the next president on which government agencies to eliminate.
“Government Efficiency Department” is not necessarily a new idea
Politicians always promise to eliminate waste in government, but their targets are often civil servants. For example, during the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore led the National Partnership to Reinvent Government. This is an initiative aimed at streamlining the federal bureaucracy by eliminating unnecessary jobs and cutting wasteful spending. Although this project was successful in some respects, it also produced negative results. Reductions in the federal workforce were not particularly well targeted, resulting in the retirement of people with the special skills needed and making it difficult for the government to actually work as efficiently as promised.
President Ronald Reagan said in his inaugural address: “The problem is the government,” he said, pledging to drastically reduce the powers of the federal government. He plans to eliminate key government agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, and imposed a hiring freeze on his first day in office. But Reagan's plan to reduce the size of the federal government failed, and by the time he left office, more people were employed by the federal government than when he took office.
President Trump's plan to sharply cut government spending and reduce the federal workforce is likely to run into similar hurdles. One reason Musk and Ramaswamy are having a hard time finding justifiable wasteful spending is that the federal workforce hasn't grown much. The federal government employs about 3 million full-time workers, about the same number as in the late 1960s. If you take contractors into account, the number is much higher (about 10 million), but again, it hasn't changed much since the 1980s and has ebbed and flowed in most cases, but has grown exponentially. It's not like I'm doing it.
At least it's nowhere near $2 trillion, especially since the newly created committee has no intention of pursuing areas of spending that actually need better accounting, like the Pentagon, which has failed six audits. If there is no, it is unlikely that you will be successful in discovering a significant source of waste. For many years in a row. But that doesn't mean the committee won't recommend any cuts, and the scale Musk and Ramaswamy hope will almost certainly have a negative impact on the economy.
So while the commission's announcement may have excited some Republicans and memecoin investors, they should know that if this commission is successful, there could be a recession on the other side. It is.
