President elect Trump has named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in an effort to trim massive federal overreach. Musk offered the idea in a meeting on X back in August. Trump just made the department official. The acronym is a nod to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin of which Musk is a fan. DOGE will actually function outside government.
Bureaucracy getting trimmed
Trump’s statement on it reads that it will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies”. It will give government an “entrepreneurial approach”.
Trump added, “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” Ramaswamy spoke with Maria Bartiromo recently.
Huge reductions
Ramaswamy explained,
“We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government … I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.”
Ramaswamy said that there’s money being spent that Congress never even authorized. There’s “over half-a-trillion dollars that’s spent every year right now was not even authorized by Congress in the first place.”
The administrative state
There’s a lot going on that the public doesn’t know about. “The dirty little secret right now … is people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state. That was created through executive action. It’s going to be fixed through executive action.”
Ramaswamy reminded that it wasn’t their intention to be cruel. There’s a lot of good people working. The problem is there’s too many.
“Our goal is not to be cruel, by the way, to the individual federal employees. Most of them, I do want to say this, are individually good people, and we want to be compassionate and generous in how we handle this transition. But the real issue is, there’s just too many of them. We don’t need 4 million and we shouldn’t have 4 million civil servants who can’t be elected — who aren’t even elected or can’t be removed from their positions. It’s antidemocratic.”
