Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tasked with slashing government spending. Will they be successful?
Elon Musk was in Washington, D.C. last week. The world’s richest man wasn’t in town to sell his vision for the future of space travel, social media, or electric vehicles, however. He was in the nation’s capital with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to help sell lawmakers on President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which will outline plans to sharply reduce government spending during the second Trump administration.
Promises to slash the federal budget are nothing new, of course. Indeed, during his first term in office, Donald Trump promised to slash federal agency budgets by five percent. (Those cuts never happened.) But President Trump was hardly the first commander-in-chief to try, and fail, to reduce government spending.
We can find similar panels going back nearly 120 years to President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, Roosevelt created the Committee on Department Methods, popularly known as the Keep Commission, which was made up of officials within the federal government, including the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency. That panel’s mission was to improve the administration of government services by refining salary classifications, purchasing procedures, accounting procedures, cost accounting, and general business methods. (In a not-so-surprising twist of irony, the Keep Commission evolved into a typical government bureaucracy. It formed 12 subcommittees that were composed of about 70 civil servants.)
President Ronald Reagan had his Grace Commission, which did result in some military base closures and other small program eliminations, but fell far short of its goal to reduce spending by billions of dollars. Another panel, the National Economic Commission, empaneled by President Reagan in 1987 to reduce government spending, never produced a report. Former Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government initiative had some limited impact, but more recent efforts like President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, more commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles Commission, were largely unsuccessful. The 2011 Budget Control Act (remember sequestration?) also failed to truly reduce expenditures since, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, then-President Barack Obama and Congress provided relief from the full effects the cuts in the years after the BCA was enacted.
Will the DOGE be any more successful than these past efforts? What exactly will the department look like, what will its priorities be, and how have lawmakers reacted so far?
Let’s take a look.
What Is The Department Of Government Efficiency?
Musk and Ramaswamy will co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency, which, unlike the name suggests, will not be a government agency at all. President-elect Trump has not outlined where the DOGE will be housed, the exact form it will take, or the authority under which it will operate. Musk and Ramaswamy may not even ever be political appointees (and, therefore, government employees), much less be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. (In fact, back in November, the two pledged they would “serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees.”)
Commissions made up of so-called government outsiders are not new. The formal name of President Reagan’s Grace Commission was the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (PPSSCC). J. Peter Grace, CEO of W. R. Grace and Company, chaired the panel, which included more than 150 prominent business leaders who volunteered their time to serve on the commission. As the Reagan Library has noted, the President’s Private Sector Cost Control Survey, a separate organization led by Mr. Grace, raised private donations to fund the PPSSCC. The U.S. Department of Commerce did “provide support on computer issues, agency liaison, and other related matters” while the White House Counsel’s Office “supplied legal advice on PPSSCC organization and functioning, and coordinated the personnel clearance process for members of the Executive Committee.”
The DOGE could adopt a similar model. As legal experts at Pillsbury, LLP have explained, the DOGE “is intended to serve as an advisory or consulting organization which … provides recommendations or strategies for government leaders to implement.” The organization “will identify issues and make recommendations to the White House, agency leaders, and Congress for action,” but “as an autonomous entity,” the DOGE will “not have authorities to issue rules, rescind regulations, terminate federal employees, or enforce federal laws.”
That clarification is important: the DOGE’s recommendations will be just that, recommendations. The Trump administration, and certainly members of Congress, can simply choose to ignore whatever Musk, Ramaswamy, and the DOGE say. (As Congress did with both the Grace and Keep Commissions.) Musk and Ramaswamy have said, however, that they will “focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”
According to legal experts at Gibson Dunn, LLP, if the DOGE is set up as a formal Federal Advisory Committee (FAC), it will be subject to some recordkeeping, disclosure, and conflicts requirements, but, again its recommendations will not have the force of law and can be ignored.
The details about how and with what authority the DOGE will operate have not stopped Musk and Ramaswamy from moving forward aggressively, however.
What Programs Is The DOGE Likely To Target?
Musk and Ramaswamy outlined their plans for the DOGE in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published two weeks after the election.
Their first order of business will be to reduce federal regulations. “In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the [Supreme Court] justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote. “In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority.”
Musk and Ramaswamy said the DOGE “will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.” Specifically, the DOGE “will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.” (Legal experts have countered that it won’t be quite so easy for the Trump administration to simply stop enforcing implemented federal regulations.)
Second, Musk and Ramaswamy will endeavor to reduce the federal workforce. In their op-ed, they noted that existing statute protecting federal employees, “allows for “reductions in force” that don’t target specific employees.”
Cutting overall federal spending was third on Musk and Ramaswamy’s list. Specifically, the two said the DOGE will take “aim” at the $500 billion-plus in annual expenditures “that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.” Additionally, Musk and Ramaswamy pledged to reduce spending by reviewing and reforming the federal government’s contracting process.
Musk and Ramaswamy also argued they could significantly cut spending without touching entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which make up the bulk of federal outlays. “Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs,” the two wrote. “But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud, and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.”
The two have earned some believers on Capitol Hill — and not just from lawmakers who routinely argue for a smaller federal government.
Strange Bedfellows: Progressive Reaction To The DOGE
While Musk, Ramaswamy, and the DOGE already have attracted a lot of skepticism and criticism, particularly from Democrats, some progressive lawmakers have offered praise.
Including from, of all people, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
As The Hill has reported, on Musk’s social media platform X, Sen. Sanders said “Musk is right” — at least when it comes to his desire to reduce defense spending. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,” Sen. Sanders noted.
California progressive Rep. Ro Khanna also has said he likes Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans to target the Department of Defense. “I think when it comes to defense, getting better defense for value and cutting costs, there can be huge bipartisan cooperation,” Rep. Khanna told ABC News. On X, the congressman said he is “ready to work” with the DOGE. However, Rep. Khanna also warned Musk and Ramaswamy “should not touch” Social Security, Medicare, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
According to Newsweek, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) has said he admires Musk and that the Tesla CEO is not “an enemy.”
Republicans, at this point, seem largely on board with the DOGE. As The New York Times reported last week after Musk and Ramaswamy met with GOP lawmakers, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said, taxpayers “deserve a more responsive government, a more efficient government, one that is leaner and more focused on its primary objectives … And that’s the opportunity that we have here now. We believe it’s an historic moment for the country, and these two gentlemen are going to help navigate through this exciting new day.”
In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy said, “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long.”
Only time will tell if they have any success addressing that “threat.” But history suggests that the odds may be against them.