CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria praised Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for their plan to cut federal spending, which he said “desperately needs reform and streamlining.”
During his show on Sunday, Zakaria argued that “a good part of the rage that has built up” among Republicans comes from conservative politicians failing to slash US federal spending – and he believes Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency may be the first to follow through.
“With DOGE, we may finally get an effort to actually deliver on the central Republican promise of the last 70 years,” Zakaria said. “And we will find out what America thinks of it.”
Of President-elect Donald Trump’s recent announcements, Zakaria said DOGE – which is not actually a government agency, but will advise the White House – is the one that “excites” him the most.
He said Musk and Ramaswamy are “both brilliant and the Federal Government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome.”
Zakaria said there are more than 180,000 pages of federal regulations, so “surely it’s worth taking a close look at them and retiring many.”
However, Musk and Ramaswamy have not been tasked with an easy feat. Though Washington can be inefficient, most of what the government does is “write checks with great efficiency,” Zakaria said.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other government programs make up approximately 60% of the federal budget, and Trump has promised to protect most of this spending, Zakaria said.
The “untouchable” Department of Defense accounts for more than $800 billion worth of the federal budget, he said.
The remaining 15% of the federal budget includes items like spending on veterans’ benefits and roads and highways.
“To achieve the $2 trillion spending cuts that Musk has often talked about, he would need to eliminate all of the spending and all of the Pentagon spending, and then he’d still have work to do,” Zakaria said.
“But I do support the impulse to reform and not just because I think it will force greater scrutiny and efficiency to government, which needs it. The duo will also force the country, and especially the Republican Party, to confront a reality that it has danced around for decades,” he said.
That reality is the long-unfulfilled promise from moderate Republicans to repeal Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and tear down government spending.
The CNN host nodded to Dwight Eisenhower, the next Republican in the White House after Roosevelt, who embraced the New Deal. And Richard Nixon, who even expanded it, creating the Environmental Protection Agency and proposing a form of universal healthcare.
These Republican presidents “infuriated” conservative voters who wanted a dramatic reduction in federal spending, Zakaria said.
Though he praised Musk for his ambition, he pointed out the irony involved in the Tesla and SpaceX founder slashing the federal budget.
“Ramaswamy and Musk have both taken to posting a clip of economist Milton Friedman on their social media, in which he argues for a very limited role for the federal government,” Zakaria said. “Ironically, this role would not seem to envision any support for things like EVs and civilian space programs, which have helped create the bulk of Elon Musk’s fortune.”
Several of Musk’s companies have benefited from government spending. Over the past 16 years, his deals with the government total nearly $16 billion, according to federal contracting data.
Zakaria also argued that while it’s fair to say the US debt level is “on an unsustainable path,” a dramatic cut in federal spending “will almost certainly cause an economic downturn.”