President-elect Donald Trump listens to Elon Musk as he arrives to watch SpaceX's mega rocket Starship lift off for a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on Nov. 19.
Brandon Bell
Tech billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy head to Capitol Hill on Thursday to present their ideas for President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.
The new group is expected to recommend drastic cuts to the federal workforce and to slash regulation. To achieve those goals, though, the group will have to work through Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson posted on X, Musk’s social media platform, that the pair will discuss “major reform ideas” to “revive the principle of limited government” at their meeting with congressional Republicans.
In social media posts, podcasts, op-eds, books and speeches, Musk and Ramaswamy have sketched out what they have in mind: a 75% reduction in the federal workforce, a $2 trillion cut to federal spending and the elimination of entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Despite those major proposals, there are significant hurdles to making a sizable dent in overall spending.
Only 16% of the government’s $6.1 trillion spending in 2023 went to fund non-defense “discretionary” programs like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And cuts to defense spending, which is popular among lawmakers of all stripes and a boon to Musk’s companies, aren’t likely to find much buy-in.
Almost three-quarters of all federal spending in 2023 was so-called “mandatory spending,” paying for programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
As for the federal workforce, it has remained roughly the same size since the late 1960s.
Growing support from the Hill
While the full details of these policy proposals remain hazy, a growing number of lawmakers have signaled early support for the effort.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, recently created a Senate DOGE caucus to partner with Musk and Ramaswamy. Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, lead a similar group in the House of Representatives with around three dozen House members, including a handful of House appropriators.
On Tuesday, Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida became the group’s first Democratic member.
“If there are people with legitimate suggestions on how we can improve government efficiency, maybe bring technology to government, figure out where there’s waste and fraud and save the American taxpayer dollars, we should do that,” Moskowitz said on Morning Edition Thursday. “And it shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
More than just Congress
Musk and Ramaswamy say that Trump can make significant changes to the federal bureaucracy through executive action alone.
In his book Truths: The Future of America published in September, Ramaswamy sketches out a possible DOGE playbook. In a section called “The Path Forward” he lays out a 3-step plan.
The first step — to “appoint a czar who is accountable for permanently taming the administrative state” — has already been completed, with Trump creating DOGE.
The second, he writes, is to embed lawyers in every agency to find unconstitutional regulations.
And the third step: present these findings to the president — who could end regulation through executive order and therefore eliminate jobs and possibly entire agencies.
“The appointed czar could lay the groundwork, so long as the president is ready to sign on the dotted line,” Ramaswamy writes.
And most recently, he posted on X that most government projects should come with “a clear expiry date.” DOGE has one, he wrote: July 4, 2026.
New DOGE, old tricks
This is not the first effort to address government spending.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan authorized the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also known as the Grace Commission. Businessman J. Peter Grace chaired the outside commission which created a report with thousands of recommendations that Congress largely ignored.
A decade later, Vice President Al Gore launched the National Partnership for Reinventing Government with the goal of modernizing and streamlining the government to make it “work better, cost less, and get results American care about.”
John Kamensky was the group’s deputy director, and said that they “were told by Vice President Gore, who led the effort, to avoid you trying to move boxes; fix what’s inside of them. And basically that was actions that don’t require congressional legislation.”
Kamensky, now a senior fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration, said he was surprised by how many federal workers stepped up to help him in its effort to make things more efficient. He fears Musk and Ramaswamy’s aggressive posture will spurn potentially helpful allies inside the bureaucracy.
“If you start with fear and cutting, you can have a lot of people resistant,” Kamensky said. “So there is a better chance of getting action with a positive vision than a negative vision.”
Relative to the Grace Commission, the effort did spark change: more than 100 federal programs sunset and 250,000 federal jobs were cut.
“There is a wonderful opportunity and it matters how it’s framed and whether you engage the civil servants in the effort may be very helpful to getting the outcomes that they’re trying to achieve,” Kamensky said.
William Howell, founder and director of the Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, notes that these workers simply implement laws enacted by Congress.
“These are the folks who keep our air clean, allow planes to land safely, that keep the meat we buy at the grocery store devoid of disease,” Howell said.
He said that indeed there are federal agencies working at cross-purposes and that leads to inefficiencies like those that DOGE is determined to root out. He pointed to the country’s “unbelievably complex tax code” and what he called an immigration system that “nobody would suggest is acceptable.” However for Howell, the rhetoric from Musk and Ramaswamy to “shut down” entire agencies and lay off workers raises red flags.
“You may need to rebuild it and you may need to adapt it to contemporary purposes,” Howell said. “But the way to do it is not by taking a sledgehammer to it.”
