Named after a meme-inspired cryptocurrency coin and theorized during a pre-election interview on billionaire Elon Musk’s social platform X, President-elect Donald Trump is launching the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in his second administration.
Musk and former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will co-chair the effort, which aims to reduce government spending and reform, or remove, entire federal agencies.
The pair is tasked with cutting the federal government’s roughly $6.75 trillion spending in 2024 and hacking through a labyrinth of executive branch regulations.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies,” Trump wrote in a statement.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”
But accomplishing that effort is not only difficult, but the exact path forward remains unclear, experts told The Epoch Times.
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Trump said DOGE would serve in an advisory capacity to the White House and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), may encounter roadblocks in its efforts to “drive large-scale structural reform.”
Despite it carrying the “department” title in its name, DOGE is not a federal agency like the Department of Education, or the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which audits the federal government for Congress.
“Trump has made clear that DOGE is an advisory board operating outside the federal government. Thus, unlike federal agencies, it does not need to be formally enacted through an act of Congress,” Jordan Haring, the director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum, told The Epoch Times.
With DOGE, Musk and Ramaswamy want to cut roughly $2 trillion from the federal budget, amounting to 30 percent of annual government spending.
Musk plans to use artificial intelligence and crowd-sourcing to find waste, abuse, and fraud in the federal government’s expenditures. That could include “deleting outright” certain federal agencies, as Ramaswamy said in a recent interview.
In 2023, federal agencies self-reported roughly $236 billion in improper payments that either shouldn’t have been issued, were made in the incorrect amount, or did not have proper supporting documentation, according to the GAO.
RealClear Investigations found that the federal government had mistakenly paid $1.3 billion to dead people in fiscal year 2023 alone, citing data from the OMB.
But DOGE may face headwinds with some of its more ambitious spending-cut plans, as reducing key portions of the federal budget could draw ire from both sides of the political aisle.
Social Security was a significant chunk—21 percent, or $1.4 trillion—of the annual federal budget in 2023, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Trump promised this year that he would not consider any changes or reforms to entitlement programs and even suggested no more taxes on benefits, which could cost the government even more.
Spending on health insurance programs like Medicare and the Affordable Care Act accounted for 24 percent of the federal budget in 2023.
DOGE can also target federal regulations, as both Trump and Musk indicated on the campaign trail.
“By all measures, the government regulatory apparatus has been growing for decades, regardless of the party in office, and the last four years have been especially active,” wrote Susan E. Dudley, the founder and senior scholar of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center.
President Joe Biden alone has presided over a vast regulatory agenda that has cost roughly $1.8 trillion in the past four years, according to the center-right advocacy group, American Action Forum.
Other economic experts are less enthusiastic about Musk’s role at the forefront of the project, which would give the tech CEO and billionaire considerable influence on the same federal government that issues critical contracts and subsidies to his companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
“Handing the keys of government to those looking to profit from our government is extremely dangerous and a massive conflict of interest,” Zach Moller, the economic program director at Third Way, a center-left think tank, wrote in a statement.
Moller fears that DOGE would lead to “more waste … and rampant abuse of political power.”
Fraud in federal spending is an important issue, and much can be accomplished by going after those who bilk federal agencies, Moller said.
“But let’s put someone in charge who is qualified and doesn’t have a personal financial stake in the outcome. We wouldn’t put a director of a government agency at the head of Tesla. Let’s not make a similar mistake here,” he added.
—Jacob Burg
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—Stacy Robinson
