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By Hugh Cameron
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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy aim to scrap "thousands of regulations" and reduce the size of the federal workforce through a new, efficiency-focused government agency.
On November 12, President-elect Donald Trump announced that the two entrepreneurs would lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an agency he said would serve an advisory role to the White House and partner with the Office of Management and Budget to "drive large-scale structural reform" within the federal bureaucracy.
In a Wednesday column for The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote: "The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws."
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Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Newsweek that while there was a clear demand to reduce wastefulness, he was unsure of Musk and Ramaswamy's ability to solve an issue that has dogged the federal government for decades.
"There's a lot of us out here who are skeptical that they're really going to be able to come in out of nowhere and figure out all these savings that nobody else has been able to figure out all these years," he said.
Employing "a lean team of small-government crusaders" and using the U.S. Constitution as their "North Star," Musk and Ramaswamy said they would target the thousands of government regulations that had been installed through "administrative fiat" and without congressional authorization.
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They cited the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo, which said government agencies must defer to Congress when imposing regulations with significant economic implications, as evidence that the "plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law."
Newsweek contacted Musk and Ramaswamy via the Trump-Vance transition team for examples of federal regulations that fall within this category.
"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," the pair wrote. "This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy."
However, Wallach said that this process may be more complicated than a "stroke of [Trump's] pen," as the pair suggest, and that any attempts to rescind regulations will inevitably be met with legal pushback, as he said had happened when Trump had attempted to repeal laws enacted by Barack Obama during his first administration.
"Courts were not always sympathetic to them," Wallach said. "They ran into a lot of judges, including those who said your reasons for reversing this policy are not adequate."
David E. Lewis, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, told Newsweek that, while presidents should be free to get advice "pretty broadly from inside and outside government," concern arises over potential conflicts of interest emerging from Musk and Ramaswamy's business dealings.
"Both billionaires have companies regulated by a number of government agencies," Lewis said "Ultimately, the recommendations that come from DOGE will have to be vetted, vetted by Congress, vetted by outside groups, and the press."
Preempting the argument that such a process would also constitute an unwarranted centralization of power in the executive branch, Musk and Ramaswamy said the move would instead "be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress."
Doing so, they continued, would allow for "mass headcount reductions" in the federal bureaucracy. They added that they would work to "identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions."
Statutory civil service protections have prevented "the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers," according to Musk and Ramaswamy, who said Trump would nevertheless be able to enact widespread terminations and that requiring federal employees to work in an office five days a week would result in a "wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome."
Their cost-saving plan would also be enacted by "taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress," which includes funds going toward the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and grants given to "international organizations" and "progressive groups like Planned Parenthood," a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive healthcare and education.
Lewis said that many would agree that there is a degree of "bloat" in the federal government, and that "there are improvements to be made."
"The disagreement is about the scale of the bloat and what counts as bloat," he added. "Part of what Musk and Ramaswamy see as bloat, other Americans see as essential government programs."
"Both billionaires have a history of trying to run things efficiently and around results," Lewis said. "As they have already begun to find out, the public sector operates quite differently than the private sector.
"Government action requires more consensus. These requirements add red tape and they slow things down. This is the cost we pay for open and democratic government."
"With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government," Musk and Ramaswamy concluded. "We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail."
"As of right now, it doesn't really exist," Wallach said of the DOGE, "other than as, you know, a group of private citizens who can get together and express their opinions."
He added that the new agency was unlikely to achieve official government status, "because then it would be subject to all kinds of bureaucratic requirements—publicity, transparency requirements—that I'm not sure Mr. Musk would like to deal with."
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Update 11/21/24 11:20 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comments from Philip Wallach of the American Enterprise Institute and David Lewis of Vanderbilt University.
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