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President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, and a likely GOP trifecta, will give him a rare opportunity to meaningfully cut government spending.
Tuesday brought the official word that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are on board to lead Trump’s temporary Department of Government Efficiency — and opened a limited window to turn the Republican mandate into action.
If they succeed, Trump can deliver on his promises to tamp down inflation, stimulate growth and shift power away from Washington and back to We the People.
While Kamala Harris sold price controls during the campaign’s home stretch, Trump wisely enlisted Musk to rail against wasteful spending.
In announcing DOGE, the president-elect said he aimed to reorganize federal agencies, “slash excess regulations” and “drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 trillion of government spending.”
Musk, who said the moves would send “shockwaves” through the system, has suggested DOGE could cut roughly $2 trillion.
That goal isn’t far off the audacious target offered by President Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission 40 years ago, which estimated that one-third of all federal income tax revenue was being wasted.
Taxpayers are rightly skeptical about commissions and grand promises from Washington to cut spending.
While Reagan’s economic policies were wildly successful during his eight years (inflation dropped from 13.5% to 4.1%), he failed to persuade Congress to cut the federal budget.
I’ve seen what commissions can and cannot do firsthand as a staffer for the late Sen. Tom Coburn when he served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission in 2010.
While it failed in its mission, Coburn’s work outside the commission helped bring about the only true federal spending cuts in the past 70 years.
He won a protracted war against congressional earmarks, leading to a Senate earmark moratorium in 2010 that held for a decade.
More importantly, in 2012 and 2013, the downward pressure Coburn and his allies applied to spending during the Tea Party era helped bring about the first two-year decrease in overall spending since the end of the Korean War.
Coburn succeeded because he was a true citizen legislator. He was businessperson and medical doctor before entering politics.
Coburn wasn’t as successful as Musk in business, but few are.
He made mere millions in the private sector, but saved billions in government.
Trump’s team should study and build on Coburn’s model of success.
Coburn showed that while commissions can shine a light on waste, it’s courage that counts.
And he was a happy warrior who knew what he was fighting for.
Even though he became known as “Dr. No” and delighted in stopping wasteful spending, he was driven by the belief that every dollar saved in Washington was a dream realized somewhere in America.
Coburn also had the foresight to put mechanisms in place to track and fight waste long after his time in office. In 2006, he worked with then-Sen. Barack Obama to pass landmark transparency legislation that put all federal spending online for the first time.
That work helped launch Open the Books, the organization I now lead, which has the largest database in history of government spending — ten billion lines of data, ready for Musk and Ramaswamy to mine.
We’ve blown the whistle on everything from the militarization of the IRS to DEI programs in federal agencies that divert funds from basic health research.
Reporting such findings directly to the public will be key to maintaining long-term support for belt-tightening.
Coburn also forced the Government Accountability Office to produce an annual report on duplicative spending. In its inaugural report in 2011, GAO said, “Reducing or eliminating duplication, overlap, or fragmentation could potentially save billions… annually and help agencies provide more efficient and effective services.”
In other words, streamlining government isn’t anti-government; it’s an essential way to serve taxpayers by improving the quality of services.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans to crowdsource wasteful spending nominations, keep a leaderboard of worst waste offenses, and offer “maximum transparency” as they work, are all in keeping with Coburn’s legacy — and the mission of Open the Books.
We’ve spent over a decade refining our database to put hard numbers at the fingertips of taxpayers, journalists and public officials.
We hope it can be a key resource to help DOGE meet its aggressive goal by Independence Day 2026.
After the historic inflationary spending of the Biden era, Trump has a decisive mandate to do more for taxpayers with less.
Now he has more tools than ever before.
John Hart is the CEO of Open the Books and the former communications director for US Sen. Tom Coburn.