The wealthy businessmen picked to lead a government demolition operation under President-elect Donald Trump can’t wait to shred the federal bureaucracy.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy describe their forthcoming effort as a “massive downsizing” that will “send shockwaves through the system” and will be “extremely entertaining.”
Trump announced Tuesday evening that the pair will lead a so-called Department of Government Efficiency that will “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Trump broadly sketched out his vision for the operation in a statement Tuesday, and Musk and Ramaswamy have offered additional details on social media, but major questions remain about what authority the team will have and how consequential they’ll be in achieving the “drastic change” Trump promised.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said Tuesday. The group’s leaders will provide advice and guidance from outside of the government, he said, and will partner with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform,” he said. Trump said their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026.
Musk, who also owns the social media platform X, has offered additional details about his vision for the endeavor.
“All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency,” he posted Tuesday. “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!
“We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.”
Department of Government Efficiency
The merch will be 🔥🔥🔥
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2024
“DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, & and abuse. Americans voted for drastic government reform & they deserve to be part of fixing it,” Ramaswamy posted Tuesday night.
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk said in a statement released Tuesday by the Trump transition team.
Trump previewed his plans to put Musk in charge of a rule-cutting effort during a speech in September, when he said Musk had agreed to lead a “government efficiency commission.”
Trump is calling the reg-slashing initiative a “department” with the acronym DOGE, an apparent reference to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin championed by Musk. But Trump would need congressional authority to set up a federal department, and this initiative appears to be shaping up as a nongovernmental advisory group.
Musk would like to demolish the majority of federal agencies, he has suggested.
“Do we really need whatever it is, 428, federal agencies? There’s so many that people never heard of and that have overlapping areas of responsibility,” Musk said in an interview that he reposted Tuesday. “I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies,” he said.
Musk wrote Tuesday, “99 Federal agencies is more than enough.”
Downsizing and relocating federal agencies have been priorities of Trump and his allies. Eliminating them entirely would be more complicated and would require congressional approval. But that could be accomplished if lawmakers are willing to cooperate.
“If Congress is prepared to do whatever Trump wants,” they “can just abolish the Department of Education or whatever else is on their hit list,” said Sally Katzen, who led the White House regulatory affairs office during the Clinton administration.
Trump’s team could also “could starve [agencies] by proposing no funds. I don’t think that would work very well,” she added.
At this point, Katzen said, it’s unclear what authority this effort will have. “Will their recommendations go through OMB and therefore have some meaning? Will they go directly to the Hill and enable Congress to vote on them?” Or will it become “a PR campaign?”
She also cautioned that two people “without any experience in government” will be charged with evaluating “in some instances, essential government functions.”
The effort’s power may stem primarily from its leaders’ standing with Trump.
“Policy priorities have to come from somewhere,” said James Goodwin, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform.
Early in his term, “in May 2025 or so,” Trump will “put out his first regulatory agenda. What is in that — or not in that — could be heavily influenced by what I call the Musk-Ramaswamy clown car,” Goodwin said.
Based on the public announcements, the effort looks like “new gloss on a rather old idea” of a presidential advisory committee, said Cary Coglianese, founding director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania.
Advisory committees can’t make any decisions, Coglianese said. But a presidential advisory committee “could, in practice, have considerable sway if a president chooses to be persuaded by the advice being given.”
It’s unclear what, if any, ethics requirements Musk and Ramaswamy will face in the new operation, and critics of Musk and Trump warn that the effort could create conflicts of interest.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, called the decision to name Musk as the co-lead of the reg-cutting effort the “ultimate corruption.”
Musk “not only knows nothing about government efficiency and regulation, his own businesses have regularly run afoul of the very rules he will be in position to attack in his new ‘czar’ position,” Gilbert said. “Placing Elon Musk, the ultimate corporate tycoon, in authority over government efficiency is laughable.”
