WASHINGTON — How do you slash, cut, restructure, and even dismantle parts of the federal government?
If you’re President-elect Donald Trump, you turn to two wealthy entrepreneurs: the spaceship-inventing, electric-car-building owner of a social media platform and a moneymaking former pharmaceutical executive who was once one of your presidential rivals.
Trump said Tuesday that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency. It will be, he said, “the Manhattan Project” of this era, driving “drastic change” throughout the government with major cuts and new efficiencies in bloated federal bureaucracy agencies by July 4, 2026.
“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Trump wrote in a statement. “I am confident they will succeed!”
The statement left unanswered all kinds of major questions about an initiative that is uncertain in seriousness but potentially vast in scope. For starters, the president-elect did not address that no such department exists. He did not elaborate on whether his two rich supporters would hire staff for the new department, which he said is aimed in part at reducing the federal workforce.
Musk, who became one of Trump’s biggest campaign contributors, said before the election that he would help the president-elect cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. But he did not explain in detail how that would be accomplished or what parts of the government would be slashed.
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk said in the statement.
Trump's statement also did not address how Musk, in particular, would handle this task without creating conflicts of interest, given that SpaceX has secured more than $10 billion worth of federal contracts over the past decade.
SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies Musk created, such as Neuralink, which manufactures computer chips implanted in the brain, have also recently been targeted in at least 20 investigations or lawsuits by federal agencies. That means Musk will somehow be watching over agencies that police his companies.
Trump’s statement said only that this new department would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” suggesting that Musk will not take a formal role as a federal official.
Slashing government regulations and spending became a top priority for Musk as his frustrations have grown, particularly this year, with what he considers excessive or redundant oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Interior Department, as SpaceX sought launch licenses to continue testing its newest rocket called Starship.
SpaceX’s Texas launch site is set up next to a national wildlife refuge and state park, requiring detailed environmental reviews before launches, a process that has infuriated Musk, slowing his plans to take humans to Mars.
The name of the new department — DOGE — appeared to be a play on another one of Musk’s many investments: the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which the billionaire regularly promotes.
Ramaswamy, a 39-year-old political novice, challenged Trump for the Republican nomination before dropping out and becoming a fervent Trump acolyte. As Trump campaigned in the past year, Ramaswamy became a frequent surrogate, singing his praises and spreading the conspiracy theories that Trump had long embraced.
As part of his message, Ramaswamy vowed to help take Trump’s promise to cut government even further. He proposed immediately eliminating the Education Department, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service by executive order. He said the federal workforce should be cut by 75% in a mass layoff. He said he would slash foreign aid to places like Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Promises of government reform are hardly new in Washington. Previous presidents have pledged much the same, though often without quite as much flourish.
In 1993, after President Bill Clinton promised to “reinvent government,” Vice President Al Gore led the newly created National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The goal was similar to Trump’s effort — to reduce federal spending by eliminating wasteful programs, cutting unnecessary jobs, and making the bureaucracy work better.
By the time it ended five years later, Gore’s effort had succeeded in reducing some overlap in government programs and cutting some federal jobs. But it fell far short of a total reinvention of the government. With about 3 million employees, the federal government headcount has grown slightly in recent years but remains well below the peak it reached in the late 1980s.
Trump, whose political appeal was built in part on a promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, has long aimed at the size of the bureaucracy. But in his first term, he did little to act on those promises.
Now, he is promising that Musk and Ramaswamy will succeed where he did not.
“I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans,” Trump wrote. “Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion of Government Spending.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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