DOGE: How Elon Musk could use his new meme “department” to target government employees and programs

President-elect Donald Trump is gifting two of his most ardent billionaire supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, with control over a so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and with it a supposed mandate to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.” According to the announcement, DOGE will an advisory department that operates “outside of the government” while partnering with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to carry out its agenda.

Both men have voiced ambitious ideas for how to use their new powers, whatever they may turn out to be.

Musk boasted that DOGE, a reference to his favored cryptocurrency Dogecoin, will send “shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” His recurring suggestion to cut government spending by a nearly a third, or $2 trillion, is outdone only by Ramaswamy’s own proposal to cut as much as 75% of the federal workforce.

Such a reduction of the federal government would severely disrupt services central to national stability and the functioning of society, including quality control of consumer goods and medicines, background checks for firearms purchases, socioeconomic safety nets for working and middle-class Americans, law enforcement and special education programs. Musk has admitted that his plans would inflict “hardship” on Americans; austerity measures in other countries have led to skyrocketing poverty rates and economic instability.

However, some government experts have noted that DOGE faces significant guardrails to carrying out a hypothetical Musk-Ramaswamy agenda.

For one, it’s unclear how Musk will chart a $2 trillion cut when two-thirds of the $6.7 trillion federal budget goes to mandatory spending through programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while discretionary spending is largely used for military and defense programs that neither Democrats nor Republicans have much appetite for downsizing. Trump, for his part, has denied any intention of cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid though he does have a history of walking back on his promises, and his proposed 2020 budget would have cut all three. 

Any steep budget cuts or the elimination of agencies Musk and Ramaswamy might have in their crosshairs will require the approval of Congress, where Republicans hold only a narrow majority in the House and must, for now, contend with potential Democratic filibusters in the Senate. And it’s not just Democrats who could thwart their plans — Republicans in favor of paring down government in general might also object to a number of cuts that would harm or anger their constituents, and many of their districts benefit from farm subsidies, military bases, public works projects and clean energy programs.

In 2021, a Brookings Institution study found that in the 117th Congress (2021-2023), Republicans on average requested over $20 million more in federal earmarks for their districts than did Democrats. For both members of both parties, the successful allocation of funds is often rewarded with re-election by their beneficiaries.

Trump still has a number of options to enact DOGE proposals without congressional approval, including a plan to use Schedule F to reclassify federal workers as political appointees and fire them, or simply making their jobs much more unpleasant. Zoë Schiffer, a tech journalist and the author of “Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter,” told Slate that Musk would welcome those kinds of methods. “He was willing to endure a certain amount of pain if it meant that he wasn’t going to have to pay a premium in terms of people’s salaries and equity,” she said of his approach to Twitter.

Trump’s aides are also exploring ways to challenge a 1974 budget law that, if struck down, would allow Trump to unilaterally make cuts that would otherwise require buy-in from Congress. Ramaswamy has voiced support for this approach, publicly calling on Congress to repeal the law and suggesting workarounds if that fails.

Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy have offered a clear map for what they will cut and how they will do it, but they have floated individual hints and suggestions in the past. Musk has frequently taken aim at the Department of Education, characterizing it as a left-wing indoctrination tool, but has not yet called for its elimination. Ramaswamy has been more specific, saying on the 2024 campaign trail that he’d at the very least close the Department of Education, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If he persists in his desire to cut 75% of the federal workforce, he’d have to essentially dismantle the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security, which collectively employ about 60 percent of civilians working in government.

On Thursday, the official X account for America, Elon Musk’s Super PAC, posted a list of programs that it claimed $900 billion taxpayer dollars was being “wasted on” and that DOGE would “fix,” including “Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Business on NIH’s ‘Monkey Island,'” “DOD’s Lobster Tank” and “‘Real Fake’: DHS’s 1st Graphic Novel About Disinformation.” While the creative language sheds little daylight on what those programs actually entail, it seems that Musk wants to take the axe to a range of scientific projects sponsored by the government that he may or may not understand and which add up to far less than any federal entitlement program.

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The placement of DOGE outside government exempts it from the congressional approval process, but could put it under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which lays out the rules for how external groups must operate and be accountable to the public, and means that at its starting point, the department will have no direct authority over federal government operations. The lack of clarity has raised questions over how it will be funded — some Trump advisors have suggested asking Congress for $35-50 million in funding or soliciting private donations for an office headed that’s not really part of the government but still, in theory, has oversight of government, including the federal agencies that regulate and have investigated Musk’s companies.

Regardless, Musk and Ramaswamy are forging ahead with hires, using language that suggests their project is the keystone of Trump’s second term agenda.

“We need super high-IQ, small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” read a statement from DOGE’s official X account, which already bears the grey check used to signify a government body. Interested parties must message DOGE directly after first paying Musk an X subscription fee.

The Musk tithe seems characteristic of an project that so far has divulged few specific details over what would be cut, but promises to reap great personal benefits for its appointed heads. The mere idea of DOGE has already caused the value of Dogecoin, Musk’s favored cryptocurrency, to spike. If DOGE comes to fruition, Musk and Ramaswamy will possess an official channel to advise Trump on who does or doesn’t deserve the government funding, even as their own companies have benefited from massive federal subsidies.

This conflict of interest is not the only contradiction at play. For all of Trump’s railing against “unelected bureaucrats” holding political influence, he has now appointed a pair of unelected billionaires to propose changes to the same agencies that regulate and fund their companies. What it amounts to, and whether those involved can get along, remains to be seen.