Democrats and good government groups are skeptical of how much influence President-elect Donald Trump’s outside advisory commission chaired by billionaire Elon Musk and onetime presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will have over government spending and the state of the federal workforce, NBC News reports.
Since Trump announced his plans for a “Department of Government Efficiency,” or “DOGE” — a play on a cryptocurrency Musk has promoted — both Musk and Ramaswamy have talked up their big plans to slash government regulations and spending while downsizing the federal workforce.
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Despite its name, it won’t actually be a “department,” like the Department of Education or the Department of Homeland Security. Creating a government agency would require approval from Congress. The effort won’t even be inside the government.
Trump said in his statement Tuesday that DOGE “will 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,” adding that Musk and Ramaswamy’s work will be completed “no later than July 4, 2026.”
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“It will be done much faster,” Musk said Wednesday on his X platform.
But the commission’s place outside the formal government structure raised plenty of questions about just how likely it is to accomplish its goals.
Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group devoted to making government work more effectively, said the real authority rests with the Cabinet secretaries and agency heads Trump is choosing.
“From the outside, will Musk and Ramaswamy be able to do a whole lot? It’s very difficult to see how that will be the case,” Stier said in an interview. “There are 450 departments when you look at the major components of our government. The people who run them are the leaders who are being named right now. You can say ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that’ from the outside, but to get it done, you need people who really know how to make things happen and to execute effectively.”
Stier said he has yet to see the Trump transition team put forward a plan that would genuinely improve the workings of government.
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The so-called DOGE “is again an example where it does not yet appear to be a serious effort,” Stier said. “It’s understandable why the goal of making our government more effective is a good one, but there are all kinds of reasons why this is not the way to achieve that.”
Both Musk and Ramaswamy have already put forth some of their ideas for government reform. Musk has pledged to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget — though he has offered few specifics about what he would look to cut. The total amount of discretionary spending in the federal budget is about $1.7 trillion, and Trump has pledged not to cut Social Security and Medicare, two of the government’s largest expenses. During a late-October town hall on X, Musk suggested his ideal spending cuts could trigger economic pain for people.
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” he said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, highlighted federal spending on Social Security and Medicare, saying the new commission “should look beyond just cutting fraud and reducing bureaucracy to also identify places where the taxpayer is not getting the best value for their dollar.”
“Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas,” she said in a statement, adding, “It will take an all-hands-on-deck approach to fix our fiscal situation, and this effort could make a tremendous contribution.”
One area Musk targeted after the panel was announced was spending on medical research. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, said Wednesday on X that the government shouldn’t appropriate money for programs that have expired.
“There are 1,200+ programs that are no longer authorized but still receive appropriations,” he wrote. “This is totally nuts. We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes. We’ll challenge any politician who disagrees to defend the other side.”
Ramswamy’s post prompted some users to note that among those expired programs is veterans’ health care — one of the largest expenses in that bucket.
“It’s unclear at this point what the exact role or mandate will be of this advisory committee,” said Joe Spielberger, policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog. “But first of all, just putting two knuckleheads in charge of government efficiency sounds pretty counterintuitive as a starting point.”
Ramaswamy, the founder of the biotech company Roivant Sciences, had a laser focus on slashing the federal bureaucracy during his time as a GOP presidential primary candidate. Speaking with NBC News as a candidate, he outlined his desire to use what’s known as “reduction in force” regulations to trim the federal workforce while also shuttering a number of federal agencies.
He predicted he would overcome any legal challenges because he wasn’t proposing to fire individual career officials, who are covered by civil service protections, but to institute widespread layoffs, eliminating jobs altogether.
Ramaswamy also sought to eliminate the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Education Department; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and the Food and Nutrition Service within the Agriculture Department.
Speaking recently with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson on X, Ramaswamy predicted Republicans could trigger a mass exodus from the federal workforce by simply mandating a five-day, in-office workweek across the government, estimating that “25%” of civil servants would hit the exits soon after.
Democrats acknowledged they had little ability to prevent the Trump administration from enacting the changes Musk and Ramaswamy suggest.
“Here’s the truth: The only governing force that can stop or temper that [is] going to be the bravest Republicans in the House or in the Senate,” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said. “It’s not going to be us, because we won’t have the votes. We don’t have the votes. We’re in the minority. It’s going to come down to how much craziness, how much absurdity will the Republicans in the House or the Senate want to jam up or not.”
Civil servants and their advocates had already been concerned over a cornerstone of Trump’s pledged agenda — reinstituting the “Schedule F” executive order briefly implemented at the end of his first term, which enables his administration to reclassify tens of thousands of federal civil workers with roles in shaping policy into at-will political positions, making them much easier to fire and replace.
“In many ways, this sounds like just the latest iteration of the war against the federal civil service and targeting federal workers as ideological opponents or enemies of the people, not based on their ability to do the jobs they’re hired for but because folks [like] Elon and Vivek are ideologically opposed to those agencies or those departments or the specific roles that they are performing,” Spielberger said. “This should be seen as a real attempt not to try to get more government accountability but just to gut agencies and departments and purge the federal workforce where they see fit.”
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is the world’s richest person, and he launched a super PAC that spent more than $200 million on boosting Trump’s electoral chances this year. He has been by Trump’s side throughout the transition process, with one person familiar with Trump telling NBC News he’s “behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it.”
When Musk took over the social media company Twitter — which he renamed X — he laid off a sizable proportion of its workforce.
SpaceX also has $3.6 billion in government contracts, which advocates said presented a clear conflict of interest for his ability to recommend spending and regulatory slashes to the government.
“Placing Elon Musk, the ultimate corporate tycoon, in authority over government efficiency is laughable,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of the progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “Musk not only knows nothing about government efficiency and regulation, his own businesses have regularly run afoul of the very rules he will be in position to attack in his new ‘czar’ position. This is the ultimate corporate corruption.”
Democratic response to the commission has been mixed. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on X that the committee “is off to a great start with split leadership: two people to do the work of one person. Yeah, this seems REALLY efficient.” But Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., who briefly ran for president this cycle, responded to the news on X: “I’m a Democrat for Government Efficiency. 🙋🏼♂️”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said: “I have no idea what they’re going to do, who’s going to work for them, but I suspect that the task may be a little more difficult than they think. Rather than just slashing $2 trillion, they may want to look at exactly what the priority should be right now. And I’m hopeful they’ll be a little more careful and thoughtful than slash and burn might be.”
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said he was willing to give the Musk- and Ramaswamy-led commission a chance, saying President Bill Clinton similarly tried to highlight and root out government inefficiencies.
“I’ve been saying this for a long time. You start with your defense agencies,” Booker said. “There is a procurement problem we still have that has never been addressed that could save our country billions of dollars. There are legacy systems that we invest in that are not what we need for the 21st century. So again, I’m not reflexively going to be condemning the things that Donald Trump does. I’m going to be evaluating them.”
He added, however, that Democrats wouldn’t go along with DOGE if it became a way of “undermining our democratic traditions, the agencies that are holding corporations accountable.”
Thomas Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, was upbeat about the DOGE initiative and predicted that it could achieve meaningful efficiencies in government operations. With Trump’s party controlling both the House and the Senate, Congress is positioned to pass the recommendations the committee devises, he said.
“In this second term in particular, President Trump has a better understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it,” Schatz said. “He didn’t do this in his first term, and he knows how hard it is to get these things implemented.”
The closest parallel to the initiative Trump laid out may be the Grace Commission, which President Ronald Reagan set up in 1982 to root out those inefficiencies. The commission was named after a private-sector businessman, J. Peter Grace.
Reagan, through executive actions, saved $100 billion out of the $424 billion the Grace Commission’s recommended savings would have provided over three years, said Schatz, whose group grew out of the Grace Commission.
A young White House lawyer wrote in an internal memo in 1985 that it would be a “disaster” to set up an advisory committee of private-sector executives to implement the Grace Commission’s recommendations.
In a warning that may prove prophetic given Musk’s business dealings with the federal government, the lawyer wrote, “Serious conflict of interest problems arose from having corporate CEOs scrutinizing the internal workings of agencies charged with regulating their businesses.”
The lawyer who wrote that memo? John Roberts, who is now the chief justice of the United States.
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:
