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Elon Musk, who visited the Capitol with his son on Thursday, says he can cut roughly one-third of federal government spending
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are on Capitol Hill to discuss their newly-announced advisory team that the two billionaires say will cut regulations, spending, and headcounts within the federal government.
"The taxpayers deserve better," House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Thursday ahead of a meeting with Musk and Ramaswamy. "They deserve a more responsive government, a more efficient government."
The Department of Government Efficiency, or “Doge” - seemingly a winking reference to Musk’s cryptocurrency of choice, dogecoin - was first announced by Donald Trump last month.
“It will become, potentially, 'The Manhattan Project' of our time,” the president-elect wrote on his social media platform, referring to a top-secret World War Two programme to develop nuclear weapons. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of 'DOGE' for a very long time.”
But despite Trump’s enthusiasm, much remains unclear about Doge and how it will function. As Musk and Ramaswamy meet with lawmakers, here’s a look at what we know about their nascent agency.
It is not a government department
Though Doge has the clear support of Trump, and has the word “department” in its name, it is not an official government department - the type of body that has to be established through an act of Congress and typically employs thousands of staff.
Instead, it seems Doge will operate as an advisory body, run by two of Trump’s closest allies and with a direct line to the White House.
The pair will assist the Trump transition team in recruiting the Doge team, they said, who will provide guidance to the White House on spending cuts, and compile a list of regulations they believe are outside agencies’ legal authority.
“DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission,” they wrote.
To some supporters of this new body, Doge's outsider status - as well as its somewhat vague mandate - will serve as a benefit.
"They're a little more untethered to the bureaucracy itself and to the systems that slow processes down around here," Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told the BBC on Thursday. "I think the lack of parameters is part of what will make them effective."
The specifics do not seem nailed down, but the overall picture is clear - Doge’s leaders want major government reform, by way of major cuts.
The federal bureaucracy “represents an existential threat to our republic,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Journal. “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, has said he can find more than $2tn in savings - around a third of annual federal government spending.
And the two have said they will slash federal regulations, oversee mass layoffs and shut down some agencies entirely.
"I think we should be spending the public's money wisely," Musk said on Thursday, on his way to a closed-door meeting with incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican.
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Vivek Ramaswamy, who joined Musk in meeting with lawmakers, threw his support behind Trump soon after dropping out of the Republican primary in January
Ramaswamy, a financier who ran for the Republican presidential nomination earlier this year, vowed during his campaign to shutter the Education Department, the FBI, and the IRS - promises he has repeated in recent weeks.
Speaking at a gala held at Mar-a-Lago last month, Ramasamy thanked Trump “for making sure that Elon Musk and I are in a position to start the mass deportations of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the DC bureaucracy".
"And I don't know if you've got to know Elon yet, but he doesn't bring a chisel, he brings a chainsaw, and we're going to be taking it to that bureaucracy," Ramaswamy said. "It's going to be a lot of fun."
‘Compensation is zero’
Musk has solicited employees on X, formerly Twitter, the social media platform he owns.
Doge-hopefuls have been asked to send their resumes directly to the newly-created Doge account on X. Applicants should expect 80+ hour workweeks, according to a post from Doge, devoted to “unglamorous cost cutting”. And, according to Musk, all that work at Doge will not be rewarded with a salary.
“This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote on X.
Only the "top 1% of applicants" will be reviewed by Musk and Ramaswamy, the Doge account said, though it did not specify how applicants will be ranked.
Doge is on a deadline
Even before it’s really up and running, Doge’s expiration has been set - 4 July, 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 said when announcing the new body.
Some Trump allies hope Doge will mirror the Grace Commission, a private-sector commission established by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 to reform the federal bureaucracy and control spending.
During its two-year tenure, the Grace Commission submitted more than 2,500 recommendations to the White House and Congress. Most were never implemented, however.
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Kamark pointed to her work managing the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review, an effort to reduce government spending in the 1990s which saved over a billion dollars and cut 250,000 people from the federal work force.
But so far, Musk and Ramaswamy's project, "is not a serious effort", she said.
The notion of cutting one-third of the government’s spending - like Musk has pledged - is “ridiculous”, she said. Roughly two-thirds of the total budget is mandatory, and includes popular programmes like Social Security and Medicare.
“You cannot touch people's social security payments or their veterans retirement payments or people's medicare reimbursements without getting statutory changes... they don't have the power to enact any of those," she said.
But some parts of Doge have attracted somewhat unlikely praise.
Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, said this week Musk “is right” about proposed cuts to the defence budget. The Pentagon has “lost track of billions”, Sanders wrote on X, saying the department had failed its seventh audit in a row.
Other Democrats have offered similar glimmers of support. Representative Ro Khanna of California said he also supported cuts to Pentagon spending. And this week, Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz of Florida became the first in his party to join the House Doge caucus, a Congressional caucus that is tasked with reducing government spending, but does not report directly to the Doge advisory board.
“Reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue,” he said in a statement..
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Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)[note 1] is a proposed presidential advisory commission in the United States. The title is the popularly used moniker of the concept and does not currently represent the official name of the commission. It is tasked with restructuring the federal government of the United States and removing regulations in order to reduce expenditures and increase government efficiency. Despite the name, DOGE is not planned to be a federal executive department, the creation of which would require the approval of the U.S. Congress.[1]
The idea of DOGE has been linked to Trump's campaign promises to cut federal spending and reduce the size of government and the size of the federal fiscal deficit.[2][3]
The concept of DOGE emerged in a discussion between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, where Musk floated the idea of a department for streamlining government efficiency. In August 2024, Trump said at a campaign event that, if he were elected, he would be open to giving Musk an advisory role.[4] In response, Musk wrote a post on X saying "I am willing to serve", along with an AI-created image of him standing in front of a lectern marked "Department of Government Efficiency".[5] The commission's acronym DOGE has been described as referencing dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that Musk promotes.[6] Later, the suggestion was made by Trump of establishing such a department and for it to be headed by Musk.[7][8]
Musk has suggested that the commission could help to cut the U.S. federal budget by up to US$2 trillion through measures such as reducing waste, abolishing redundant agencies, and downsizing the federal workforce. Ramaswamy also stated that DOGE may eliminate entire federal agencies and reduce the number of federal employees by as much as 75%.[9][10] DOGE may attempt to do this through re-enacting Schedule F.[11] Musk has also proposed consolidating the number of federal agencies from more than 400 to fewer than 100.[12]
Musk has described deregulation as the only path to the SpaceX Mars colonization program, and promised he will "get the government off people's back and out of their pocket".[13]
On November 5, 2024, Musk suggested that former U.S. representative and two-time Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul could work with DOGE.[15][16]
On November 14, on social media, Musk called for individuals who were interested in working for the commission to send CVs to DOGE's X account via DM.[17][18]
On December 22, Trump announced that Katie Miller, the wife of incoming deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, would be joining DOGE.[19]
Plans to create a new congressional subcommittee were announced on November 21 by House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY).[21] This new subcommittee will be called the Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, will be chaired by representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and will work closely with DOGE to reduce governmental expenditures.[22][23][24][25] On November 22, senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) was appointed to lead the corresponding Senate DOGE Caucus.[26][27]
In December 2024, Ernst proposed a bill dubbed "DRAIN THE SWAMP Act", which would require each executive agency to relocate at least 30 percent of employees working at Washington, D.C., headquarters to offices located outside of the D.C. metro area; while also restricting the ability to telework.[28][29][30]
Vox said that the body is "unlikely to have any regulatory teeth on its own, but there's little doubt that it can have influence on the incoming administration and how it will determine its budgets".[34]
Donald Trump said the body would help to "dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies". He also stated that Musk and Ramaswamy will work with the Office of Management and Budget to address what he called "massive waste and fraud" in government spending.[35]
According to tweets by Musk and Ramaswamy, the ultimate goal of DOGE is to become so efficient that it eventually eliminates its own necessity. The commission has a set expiration date of July 4, 2026, the United States Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary), which follows Ramaswamy's idea that most government projects should have clear expiration dates.[38]
Trump stated that the entity's work will "conclude" no later than July 4, 2026,[39] also coinciding with a proposed "Great American Fair".[40] Trump called the proposed results of DOGE "the perfect gift to America".[41]
On October 28, 2024, at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, Musk stated that he believed DOGE could remove US$2 trillion from the U.S. federal budget[44] (a figure higher than the federal government's total discretionary outlays in 2023).[45][46][47] Musk has not specified whether these savings would be made over a single year or a longer period.[48]Maya MacGuineas of the public policy organization Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has said that this saving is "absolutely doable" over a period of 10 years, but it would be difficult to do in a single year "without compromising some of the fundamental objectives of the government that are widely agreed upon".[49]
Questions have been raised whether Musk's and Ramaswamy's companies being contractors to the federal government causes a conflict of interest with their proposed work in DOGE.[50][51][52][53]
In December 2024, senator Bernie Sanders praised Musk on the plans by DOGE to cut defense spending stating that "Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It's lost track of billions."[55][56] Democratic congressman Ro Khanna also indicated that he would be open to working with DOGE to reduce defense spending.[55]
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