Trump tapped Musk to co-lead the “Department of Government Efficiency.” What the heck is that?

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that two of his most vocal supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the “Department of Government Efficiency.” 

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.”

If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of this department before, it’s because it doesn’t exist. Despite the misleading name — executive departments can only be established by Congress — Trump simply appears to be forming a new presidential advisory commission or task force to offer guidance.

So at first glance, this commission might seem entirely unserious. Its acronym, “DOGE,” is an apparent homage to the meme cryptocurrency that Musk often promotes, and the coin’s value surged after Trump made the announcement. It’s also somewhat ironic that a commission looking for government inefficiency and waste requires not one but two co-chairs. 

But the project isn’t only an inside joke, it’s also part of Trump’s existing plan to decimate the federal workforce. His campaign called for relocating government workers out of Washington, DC, and making significant cuts to civil service jobs — an attempt to dismantle what Trump and his allies call the “deep state,” even though these jobs are often necessary to keep the federal programs running — and “DOGE” shows that he’s at least starting to execute that plan.

Trump didn’t acknowledge that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is new, nor did he really explain what it will look like. He only offered vague details, like how the commission would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform.” The commission, in other words, 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.

What Musk and Ramaswamy want, and why it’s dangerous

While it’s still unclear what this commission will look like or how big it will be, there’s plenty of reason to take the threat that it poses seriously. On the campaign trail, Musk, who served as a Trump surrogate, promised to find $2 trillion that could be eliminated from the federal government’s $6.75 trillion budget. And Ramaswamy, who ran against Trump in the Republican primaries but later campaigned for him, has proposed laying off 75 percent of the federal workforce and abolishing agencies like the FBI, IRS, and the Department of Education.

The scale of those cuts would be catastrophic. In October, Musk himself said his plan to slash the federal budget would cause economic turmoil, cause markets to crash, and “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.” Experts have also said Musk’s $2 trillion figure is more than merely aspirational — it’s practically impossible to find that much money to cut without putting social programs on the chopping board. 

“You can’t get to cuts of the size they’ve been throwing around without gutting things people really care about and count on,” Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said by email.

As my colleague Eric Levitz wrote, if Trump doesn’t cut Social Security, Medicare, or defense spending, he would need to cut other government programs by up to 80 percent:

That would involve gutting all social services for low-income Americans, food inspections, air safety, health insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments, among countless other things.

The commission, which Trump said will conclude its work within two years, is also riddled with conflicts of interest. Musk’s company SpaceX, for example, has more than $10 billion in government contracts, and agencies like NASA are already overly dependent on it. The federal government has also been investigating and filing lawsuits against Musk’s companies, and Musk himself has often complained about his companies facing too much government oversight. Now, Musk will be advising the next president on which agencies he should try to eliminate.

The “Department of Government Efficiency” isn’t necessarily a new idea

Politicians always promise to end government waste, and a frequent target is the civil service. Under the Clinton administration, for example, Vice President Al Gore led the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, an initiative aimed at streamlining the federal bureaucracy by eliminating unnecessary jobs and rolling back wasteful spending. While the project succeeded in some respects, it also created bad outcomes. The reduction in the federal workforce wasn’t especially well targeted, and as a result, people with necessary and special skills left, which made it harder for the government to actually work better, as promised.

President Ronald Reagan — who in his inaugural address said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” — also promised a massive scaling back of the federal government’s reach. He had plans to abolish major government agencies, like the Education and Energy Departments, and imposed a hiring freeze on the first day of his administration. But Reagan’s plan to reduce the federal government’s footprint failed, and by the time he left office, there were more people employed by the federal government than when he started. 

Trump’s plan to dramatically reduce government spending and downsize the federal workforce will likely run into similar hurdles. Part of the reason Musk and Ramaswamy might have a hard time finding legitimately wasteful spending is because the federal workforce hasn’t grown all that much. The federal government employs about 3 million full-time workers — roughly the same as in the late 1960s. And while that number is much higher (about 10 million) when you take contractors into account, that also hasn’t changed much since the 1980s, mostly ebbing and flowing but not exponentially increasing. 

The newly created commission is especially unlikely to succeed in finding significant sources of waste — at least nowhere near $2 trillion — because it’s probably not going to go after areas of spending that actually need better accounting, like the Pentagon, which has failed its audit six years in a row. But that doesn’t mean the commission won’t recommend any cuts, and the scale that Musk and Ramaswamy are hoping for will almost certainly have a negative impact on the economy. 

So while the announcement of the commission might have excited some Republicans and meme-coin investors, they should know that if this commission succeeds, there might be a recession on the other side.