President-elect Donald Trump has given two wealthy entrepreneurs a mission that has eluded many other occupants of the White House: Make the U.S. government smaller and more efficient.
No one knows much about how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy plan to accomplish that task, only that they and the president they will serve want big reforms not beholden to precedent.
In naming the space and electric car tycoon and the healthcare entrepreneur to head a new Department of Government Efficiency, Trump said he expected them to drive “radical change,” something like the Manhattan Project, the government initiative that created the atomic bomb during World War II.
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, said in a statement. Ramaswamy said during his run for the Republican presidential nomination that he planned to advance a “radical dream” that would cut three-quarters of a U.S government workforce that numbers about 2.2 million.
In his announcement Tuesday, Trump said he expected the “major cuts and new efficiencies in bloated agencies” to be put in place by July 4, 2026 — a deadline coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The incoming president, who takes office Jan. 20, 2025, said the two businessmen — among his most vocal surrogates during the presidential campaign — will operate outside of the federal bureaucracy.
But much about how Musk and Ramaswamy will proceed remains a mystery. They will be heading a department (whose DOGE acronym matches Musk’s favored cryptocurrency) with no employees and no budget. It’s unclear if their effort will be privately funded or paid for by taxpayers. Also left unsaid: how many people will assist the two magnates and how that staff will be paid.
Experts in the federal bureaucracy emphasized that the most successful past reorganizations — particularly one driven by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore — have relied on those inside the bureaucracy to figure out how to maintain services while cutting staffing and saving money.
Musk, the world’s richest man, will face a particular onus to show that his decisions are not designed to benefit his own interests. SpaceX has secured billions of dollars of contracts with the U.S. government, and the company, along with the billionaire’s other businesses, has been the subject of multiple investigations by federal agencies.
Working in government “begins with this idea that you’re a steward of the public’s good,” said Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that advises the government. “One critical way to undermine that is by having conflicts of interest. We need to be on the alert for people who are advising the government who may have their own personal interests. Plainly, with a figure like Elon Musk, who has such broad holdings, that’s particularly important.”
Musk’s disdain for the government, long apparent, has become a frequent subject of his social media posts since Trump’s election last week.
“The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation,” he wrote on the social media site X on Wednesday. “Every year, the noose tightens a little more. We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
In another post, he added, “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!”
Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, offered a far different interpretation. “We all depend on these regulations to protect our air, water, workers, children’s safety, and so much more,” the group said in a statement. “‘Cutting red tape’ is shorthand for getting rid of the safeguards that protect us in order to benefit corporate interests.”
The organization worried that Musk would use his position to benefit himself. “If anyone had any doubts whether the Trump government aims to serve regular people or the billionaires,” the statement said, “they should now be resolved.”
At a late-October rally for Trump in New York, Musk pledged he would find “at least $2 trillion in cuts” from the federal government.
Washington budget watchers deemed that goal fantastical. U.S. government spending stands at about $6.75 trillion annually, with the vast majority of the money going in direct support to Americans. More than $5 trillion goes each year to Social Security, Medicare, federal employee retirement, unemployment compensation and the like.
A $2-trillion cut probably would mean forced reductions in direct-benefit programs, a move that most politicians in both parties have resisted.
“If they had some sense of where all that money goes, directly to beneficiaries, they never would have thrown around that $2-trillion figure,” said Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution and head of efficiency initiatives under Clinton.
Trump already has signaled some of the cuts he hopes to make. In a video on social media, he promised “very early in the administration” to close the federal Department of Education and leave educational matters to the states. Musk followed that proposal with an X message: ”Good idea.”
It remains unknown what would become of certain popular Department of Education programs, such as Pell grants to college students, if Trump goes ahead with the plan to disband the department.
Trump has also signaled that he wants to eliminate the bureaucrats who set accreditation standards for colleges and universities. He called those workers “Marxist, diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats.”
Kamarck agreed that the time has come for a thorough review of the federal government. She said the trick is to make agencies more efficient, without harming the programs that help people.
“You can’t just get rid of all the stuff in the federal government without people screaming their heads off,” Kamarck said. “The sooner they realize that, the smarter they’ll be about how to move forward.”
Also targeted by Ramaswamy for elimination when he was a presidential candidate: the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service.
If such cuts came to pass, it’s unclear what would happen to the programs those agencies oversee, including hunger reduction and nutrition programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Musk hinted at another possible target in an X posting this week, asking if tax dollars should go to National Public Radio. Republican politicians have regularly targeted NPR, accusing the radio network of a liberal bias.
But any savings there would be relatively small. NPR says that only about 10% of its annual budget of about $291 million comes from direct and indirect support from federal, state and local governments.
Ronald Reagan was the first president who promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, bringing federal bureaucrats to heel. In 1982, the Republican president appointed chemical manufacturing CEO J. Peter Grace to head a panel to study how the government could be made more efficient.
The Grace Commission made proposals it said would save almost $300 billion over three years, though the Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office estimated only about one-third of that amount would be saved. Some, but not all, commission recommendations were implemented.
A decade later, Clinton proposed a review to “reinvent government,” later creating the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Between 1993 and 2000, the initiative cut the federal workforce by 426,200, yielding $136 billion in savings to taxpayers. The effort benefited in large part from the rise of computers and automation, allowing machines to complete tasks once performed by human clerks.
Kamarck said it’s crucial to get insiders to help with reforms. “It is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t,” she said.
A 2002 Gallup Poll found that 60% of the public said they trusted the government to “do what is right” about always or most of the time. That was a vast improvement from the 23% who held that view a decade earlier. But by 2010, the trust figure had dropped down to 19%.
Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, praised Trump for renewing efforts to “dismantle the deep state.”
Musk has shown no hesitation, in the private sector, to eliminate jobs he considers superfluous. After buying Twitter in 2022 (and renaming it X) he cut staffing from close to 8,000 down to about 1,500. He contended last year that the site was regaining advertisers and “roughly” breaking even.
A former Tesla executive, Rohan Patel, used X to praise Musk’s “phenomenal” track record in business. But as to his new role as government reduction specialist, Patel added: “It is truly weird to think anyone can do these things as a government volunteer.”