President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new federal agency, the Department of Government Efficiency — thereby making an internet meme a government-shrinking reality.
Some liberals are enraged over the proposed agency and appointments, apparently worried that these relative outsiders will lack the sensitivity and restraint necessary to preserve the status quo.
Trump
said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy will “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
The novel agency, which Trump suggested could become “potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” will provide extra-governmental counsel and partner with both the White House and Office of Management and Budget “to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.”
This initiative has a strict deadline of July 4, 2026.
Trump figures that the maximization of efficiency and minimization of bureaucracy “will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.”
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people,” Musk said in the statement shared by Trump.
‘Americans voted for drastic government reform.’
Musk
indicated that the DOGE will post all of its actions online for “maximum transparency” and suggested that the novel agency will regularly update a leaderboard for the “most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.”
The tech magnate also
shared a clip from his interview with Tucker Carlson, where he said, “Just take a look at all the federal agencies and say, ‘Do we really need whatever it is, 428 federal agencies?’ There’s so many that people never even heard of and that have overlapping areas of responsibility. … I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies.”
Ramaswamy
tweeted, “Afuera!” — a term that more or less means “out” and that Argentine President Javier Milei repeated in a viral video when tearing the names of government ministries off a whiteboard.
Ramaswamy, who
indicated Tuesday that he is withdrawing himself from consideration for the pending Senate appointment in Ohio, noted further that the “DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, & … abuse. Americans voted for drastic government reform & they deserve to be part of fixing it.”
While there has long been a desire among fiscal conservatives to rein in and shrink government, this particular initiative appears to have taken shape during a
70-minute conversation in August between Trump and Musk on X Spaces.
“Inflation is caused by government overspending,”
said Musk. “Would you agree that we need to take a look at government spending and have, perhaps, a government efficiency commission that just … tries to make the spending sensible and so that the country lives within its means?”
“The waste is incredible, and nobody negotiates prices,” said Trump.
Musk stressed that there should be a government efficiency commission “that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money — that taxpayers’ hard-earned money — is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”
Trump appeared receptive to the idea, having elsewhere marveled at what Musk had done at X — canning
over 80% of the workforce and righting the ship — as well as at the wonders worked in Argentina by Milei, who took a “chainsaw” both to his leftist predecessors’ failed policies and to bureaucratic overgrowth.
Shortly after their conversation, Musk
posted an AI-generated image of himself standing at a podium emblazoned with the proposed title “Department of Government Efficiency,” along with its acronym, which users recognized alluded to another meme: “Doge,” the shiba inu dog immortalized in the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Trump was evidently unwilling to let the dream remain a meme.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was among the first in line to complain.
Hours after
belittling a two-time Bronze Star-awarded combat veteran, Warren — a senator with a platoon of staffers — wrote sarcastically, “The Office of Government Efficiency is off to a great start with split leadership: two people to do the work of one person. Yeah, this seems REALLY efficient.”
Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway III, whose
effort to spoil Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally failed last month, joined MSNBC talking head Alex Wagner Tuesday night to complain about the proposed new agency.
Wagner, who apparently missed the Biden-Harris administration’s short-lived
Disinformation Governance Board, said, “Nothing has been more Orwellian in title.”
‘What are we going to be left with at the end of this?’
Conway cast doubt on whether the DOGE was possible, telling Wagner, “First of all, it’s not going to be a governmental department as I understand it. And then there are actually rules and statutes that apply, I think. The Federal Advisory Committee Act talks about regulat[ing] from an ethics standpoint, people who are coming in and, you know, being consulted on how to run the government.”
Jeffrey Toobin, the cable news analyst who
exposed himself to colleagues on an October 2020 Zoom call, tried to reassure fellow travelers on CNN that the Administrative Procedures Act “requires a lot of hoops to be jumped through,” meaning that Musk and Ramaswamy might have trouble slashing through the Washington kakistocracy with ease.
“If you want to get rid of a government department — if you want to change the structure of the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior — you have to go through all these steps, and like it or not, these two entrepreneurs are going to have to start learning that and following it, and it’s going to drive them crazy,” said Toobin. “We’ll see how much they actually do.”
New York Times writer Lulu Garcia-Navarro expressed concern on the CNN about what might be left after Musk and Ramaswamy are finished.
“Let’s look at his track record. What did he do at Twitter, now X? He completely gutted that organization. It remains to be seen what he does in the federal bureaucracy,” Garcia-Navarro told Cooper. “Radical change — it’s a good thing, but you know, a lot of these people do not have the experience to know what they should be cutting, what they shouldn’t be cutting. These are not people [with] government experience. So it really does beg the question, what are we going to be left with at the end of this?”
While it is presently unclear which federal agencies will be plastered with pink slips by the incoming Trump administration, bureaucrats at the
FBI and Pentagon are among those now reportedly updating their resumes.
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