When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he quickly gutted the social media platform to its core operations, dispensing with anything he saw as wasteful or superfluous. Now, Donald Trump wants him to do the same to the US government.
The world’s richest man was named this week alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a former rival of Trump’s for the Republican nomination, to head up a project with a mandate to “dismantle government bureaucracy”.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym “Doge” is a nod to a Musk-endorsed cryptocurrency, is one that the multibillionaire had publicly lobbied to lead. Having become one of Trump’s highest profile supporters, he pledged at an October rally to rip $2tn out of the annual federal budget.
The project catapults Musk into the heart of the new administration, and tasks him with a central plank of Trump’s agenda: the transformation of the machinery of the state. The president-elect referred to Doge as “the Manhattan Project of our time”, a reference to the 1940s project to develop an atomic bomb.
For those who have worked with him, Musk’s relish at the opportunity to reorganise government is a result of a growing frustration at the limitations placed on his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.
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“As his companies got larger and larger, he had more and more government interactions that got more and more annoying,” says one Tesla executive. The serial entrepreneur would “complain about [local regulations in California] constantly . . . but I do think the real thing was SpaceX . . . that was the big chafe for him”.
“The absurd regulations get worse every year,” the billionaire wrote on X on Wednesday. Saying it takes government more time to complete paperwork than it takes SpaceX to build a rocket, he added: “Unless we push back, everything will become illegal.”
Ethics experts note that Musk will now potentially have the ability to strip out regulations that affect his own companies, as well as protect his entities’ billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts. His critics fear that he will use the position to go after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has been a thorn in Tesla’s side, and the Federal Trade Commission, which frustrated his takeover of Twitter in 2022.
“His own businesses have regularly run afoul of the very rules he will be in position to attack in his new ‘tsar’ position,” says Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer rights group founded by Ralph Nader. “This is the ultimate corporate corruption.”
However, those carrying scars from previous efforts to streamline the US government — which now employs more than 2.2mn people — are more sceptical about Musk’s ability to get any of his agenda through.
John Kamensky, who was among those appointed by the Clinton administration in 1993 to help review government performance with a mission to “reward the people and ideas that work and get rid of those that don’t”, says coming up with bold efficiency recommendations was never as difficult as getting them implemented.
“The challenge that private sector people don’t appreciate about the public sector is that there are multiple sign-off points,” Kamensky says, including Congress itself, which has more than 200 committees and subcommittees overseeing government departments.
Musk himself acknowledged there would be difficulties. “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote on Thursday. “What a great deal!”
It is not yet clear how Musk proposes to find his promised $2tn in cuts in a federal government with a budget of about $6.75tn.
Defence, social security, and healthcare together make up about two-thirds of spending. Eliminating the Department of Education, as Ramaswamy has previously proposed, would cut a mere 4 per cent from the federal budget.
The vast majority of government employees work in defence and security-related agencies, and culling them could lead to resistance even from a Republican congress stuffed with Trump loyalists.
Musk has hinted previously that he plans to find savings within the US defence department and the National Institutes of Health, and do away with hundreds of agencies.
Yet since his appointment, Musk has so far taken issue with isolated incidents of excessive or wasteful government spending rather than lay out a plan on how to tackle the largest line items in the annual budget.
He has amplified social media posts claiming the US government spent $4.5mn to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine (which is probably a reference to research into post-traumatic stress disorder), that it backed a study into whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous if given cocaine, and gave $338,000 to the richly endowed Columbia University, among other acts.
Last month, Musk said that SpaceX was forced to “kidnap seals” off the coast of California, fasten headphones on them and play sonic booms to see if its rocket launches upset them.
Ramaswamy has taken a more focused approach, arguing for “massive downsizing” in Washington and stopping a half-a-trillion-dollar tranche of spending on programmes including social security and supporting US veterans unless newly authorised by Congress.
During his campaign to be the Republican nominee, Ramaswamy unveiled an even more ambitious plan, threatening to do away with the FBI in its entirety, if elected.
He claimed the government was full of “unelected bureaucrats that stifle innovation” and supported “shuttering the Department of Education”, a stance Trump has since adopted.
Crucially, the Yale law school graduate outlined how the government could get around “for-cause protections”, which shield some federal employees from being fired at will, and push through mass lay-offs that will “dramatically reduce the size” of federal agencies.
Ramaswamy has been emboldened by a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court that has gradually curbed federal agencies’ powers, handing down a string of rulings earlier this year that made it harder for regulators to introduce rules, curtailed their use of in-house courts for enforcement and made it easier for businesses to challenge existing measures.
“Over the last two years, the Supreme Court has ruled that the administrative state is behaving in wildly unlawful ways,” he wrote this week.
Recent decisions by America’s highest court have given Doge the licence not just to look at rules passed by the Biden administration in the past four years, “but over the past four decades [or more]”, he added.
Even if Doge succeeds in getting official arms of the government to do its bidding, it is unlikely to be able to move fast.
Throwing out existing regulations would involve the same process that is completed when proposing new measures — a proposal justifying why a rule is being scrapped, a subsequent comment period open to the public and final implementation. This procedure would be required for each rule and could take months.
There are warnings from history here too. In 1982, Ronald Reagan appointed chemicals boss J Peter Grace to oversee a commission that would “root out inefficiency”. The body sought the advice of dozens of senior executives from corporations across the country, made more than 2,500 recommendations, and suggested $424bn in savings over three years — in an era when the entire annual federal budget was only $900bn.
“They got very little of that implemented,” says Kamensky, “because most required government legislation”.
Although Trump will enjoy a Republican majority in the Senate, the party is set to have a razor-thin majority in the House, with many members representing swing districts that rely heavily on government jobs or subsidies.
Trump himself has already been thwarted once by the complexity of the administrative state, during his first presidential term.
In 2017, he stood behind a long red tape connecting stacks of paper as tall as him, representing regulation “today”, and a much smaller stack showing rules in the 1960s. Outsized scissors in hand, he cut the ribbon saying: “When we are finished . . . we will be less than where we were in 1960 and we will have a great regulatory climate.”
A report by the Brookings Institution found that Trump was ultimately successful in rescinding only 30 per cent of the Obama-era regulations he set his sights on, mostly due to legal challenges, although he did implement fewer new rules than previous administrations.
Musk and Ramaswamy may have another hurdle to consider. Despite the initiative’s name, Doge will operate from outside government, according to a statement from the Trump campaign, raising questions of how much influence its cost-cutting programme will have on a deeply entrenched administrative state.
The body is likely to resemble a traditional advisory committee, according to Georgetown Law professor David Super. “I would describe [Doge] as routine,” he says. “It’s a new name . . . not a new idea.”
Previous committees of a similar nature have not fared well. Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, established during his first administration to investigate claims that illegal migrants had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, was closed within a year after Trump decided not to “engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense”.
The commission “met and issued a report and not much else happened, because they had no real power”, says Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
Not all of Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposals will be met with opposition from within the civil service, according to an official who held an oversight role in the Obama White House. “There are people inside of government that know what is wrong and how to fix it,” the official says.
“The federal government does need modernisation; it hasn’t updated civil service law since 1978,” says Moynihan. “It should be using technology better, there are systems like our procurement process that really need to be changed.”
But he cautions that none of this would be achieved with an overly adversarial approach from Doge’s new leaders, who have delighted in memes portraying them as ruthlessly demanding to know what civil servants do with their time before firing them.
In one post, Musk is seen entering the White House with a kitchen sink, echoing his publicity stunt soon after taking over Twitter, where he dismissed roughly 80 per cent of the workforce.
“All of the noises that they have made [so far] don’t give one much hope,” Moynihan says.
Data visualisation by Keith Fray
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