President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to trim the fat under which the federal government labors — namely, a sprawling bureaucracy and runaway government spending.
Musk spawned the idea for the department and offered to head it up during an X space with President-elect Donald Trump back in August. On Tuesday, Trump made DOGE official, saying in a statement that it will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies” and give government an “entrepreneurial approach.”
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said.
The new department has already sparked endless memes — the DOGE acronym is a nod to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Musk is a fan, and briefly changed X’s logo to the coin’s dog meme last year. Another meme making the rounds shows Musk and Ramaswamy as the downsizing consultants from the movie “Office Space,” who famously ask an employee, “What would you say you do here?”
Bureaucrats beware 😎 pic.twitter.com/zfSRjttv2s
— Fight With Memes (@fightwithmemes) November 13, 2024
Despite its name, DOGE will actually function as a commission outside the government that will work with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to advise the president on what government bloat can be cut.
DOGE will operate on a deadline. It will finish its work by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday, Trump said.
Musk is ready to go.
Since Tuesday’s announcement, the SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO has been excitedly posting about how he will approach slashing federal waste, but he is also promising to be “very open and transparent” about what DOGE does.
One of his main targets: regulation.
“The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation. Every year, the noose tightens a little more,” Musk posted Wednesday. “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
He wants a broad review of regulations to determine “which ones are sensible and which ones are not.”
Musk has personally experienced crippling regulation while trying to launch SpaceX rockets. In October, he sued California regulators and accused them of “shamelessly breaking the law” after they cited his political views in their decision to reject more rocket launches.
He also wants to shutter hundreds of the more than 400 federal departments. During an interview last month, Musk pointed out that the United States creates more than one federal agency a year on average.
“That seems a lot. That seems crazy. I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies,” Musk said.
Elon Musk explains the importance of creating the Department of Government Efficiency.
"There are around 428 federal agencies. There's so many that people have never even heard of. I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies."
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) November 13, 2024
ELON ON D.O.G.E. “We're going to make the spending lower. And if somebody's got a better idea for how to make the spending lower, tell us. But if we don't, we're going to bankrupt the country.”
— America (@america) November 13, 2024
Lowering spending is Musk’s other big objective.
“We’re going to make the spending lower, and if somebody’s got a better idea for how to make the spending lower tell us, but if we don’t we’re going to bankrupt the country, and so we’ve got to do something, and it’s got to be some pretty big moves,” Musk said during a town hall in Pennsylvania last month.
“Drain the swamps. There’s so many swamps,” he added.
He joked that he will probably need “quite a significant security team because someone might literally go postal on me — from the Post Office.”
Ramaswamy wants to take a similarly aggressive approach. The tech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate said Tuesday that DOGE would 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.
Ramaswamy also said he wants to sort out the more than half a trillion dollars a year that goes towards nearly 500 expired federal programs.
“This is totally nuts. We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes. We’ll challenge any politician who disagrees to defend the other side,” he posted Wednesday.
In September, Ramaswamy floated a “thought experiment” about firing 75% of federal employees immediately with “some metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution.”
Vivek’s “thought experiment” of cutting 75% of federal govt employees while avoiding lawsuits of unlawful termination due to discrimination.
pic.twitter.com/FWgvcBeATm— Steve Hou (@stevehouf) November 13, 2024
“Not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it,” Ramaswamy said during a podcast interview. “All we require is leadership with a spine to get in there and actually do what conservative presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about but not really effectuated ever in modern history.”
Ramaswamy said government agencies are “no different” from private companies in that “it’s 25% of the people who do 80 or 90% of the useful work.”
When Musk took over X, he laid off about 80% company’s workforce, more than 6,000 people.
While the decision was “not fun at all,” Musk said “drastic action” was necessary because the company was facing “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation” and had just “four months to live.”
DOGE is already recruiting employees, and Musk and Ramaswamy will personally review the top 1% of applicants.
“We don’t need more part-time idea generators,” the new official DOGE account posted Thursday on X. “We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
Musk and Ramaswamy have their work cut out for them. The federal government spends $6.75 trillion a year. Already this year, federal spending has increased by $114 billion. Within that massive amount is a seemingly never-ending list of eyebrow-raising expenditures.
Around $900 billion in wasted taxpayer dollars were counted last year in Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) “Festivus Report,” his annual tally of government waste that highlights glaring and often humorous examples.
Among the bigger expenses: in fiscal year 2023, the Treasury spent $659 billion on just the interest on the national debt, much of which was borrowed from China, the report noted. Taxpayers are paying to keep the lights on in federal office buildings, the majority of which are mostly empty, one report found.
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