Last week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were officially named co-leaders of Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE). On Wednesday, the two detailed their plans for the advisory group.
Musk and Ramaswamy said they will "serve as outside volunteers" to make recommendations to the Trump administration to "reduce the size of the federal government." Their main focus is on cutting spending on federal agencies, which they believe waste money and are "anti-democratic."
"Most legal statutes are not laws enacted by Congress, but 'rules and regulations' enacted by unelected bureaucrats," the two said, noting that their mission is to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget and rewrite government operations.
They said they will hire "a crack team of small government reformers" to work with the Trump administration and the White House Office of Management and Budget. Their primary vehicle for change is executive action based on two recent Supreme Court decisions, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (which overturned the Chevron Doctrine), which “demonstrated that a large number of existing federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted them under law.”
Here’s how DOGE will make recommendations on what Trump should suspend, a process that will be aided by “advanced technology”: “DOGE will work with legal experts in government agencies to apply these decisions to federal regulations enacted by those agencies, using advanced technology. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can immediately suspend them by executive action and initiate a review and revocation process. This will free individuals and businesses from unlawful regulations that Congress never passed and stimulate the U.S. economy.”
As a result, the two expect Trump to cut “thousands” of federal regulations, and say those cuts will allow for “massive reductions” in government employees. DOGE will attempt to determine “the minimum number of employees required for an agency to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutory functions.”
In the article, Musk and Ramaswamy listed some federal spending that appears to be on the way, including "$535 million per year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting" and "$1.5 billion to international organizations and nearly $300 million to progressive organizations like Planned Parenthood." (The Verge)