President-elect Donald Trump introduced on Tuesday that two of his most vocal supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the “Division of Authorities Effectivity.”
“Collectively, these two great People will pave the best way for my Administration to dismantle Authorities Forms, slash extra laws, minimize wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Businesses,” Trump stated. “It can turn into, probably, ‘The Manhattan Challenge’ of our time.”
In case you’re questioning why you’ve by no means heard of this division earlier than, it’s as a result of it doesn’t exist. Regardless of the deceptive identify — govt departments can solely be established by Congress — Trump merely seems to be forming a brand new presidential advisory fee or process pressure to supply steering.
So at first look, this fee may appear totally unserious. Its acronym, “DOGE,” is an obvious homage to the meme cryptocurrency that Musk typically promotes, and the coin’s worth surged after Trump made the announcement. It’s additionally considerably ironic {that a} fee on the lookout for authorities inefficiency and waste requires not one however two co-chairs.
However the venture isn’t solely an inside joke, it’s additionally a part of Trump’s current plan to decimate the federal workforce. His marketing campaign known as for relocating authorities employees out of Washington, DC, and making important cuts to civil service jobs — an try and dismantle what Trump and his allies name the “deep state,” despite the fact that these jobs are sometimes essential to maintain the federal packages working — and “DOGE” reveals that he’s not less than beginning to execute that plan.
Trump didn’t acknowledge that the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity is new, nor did he actually clarify what it should appear to be. He solely provided obscure particulars, like how the fee would “present recommendation and steering from exterior of Authorities, and can accomplice with the White Home and Workplace of Administration & Price range to drive giant scale structural reform.” The fee, in different phrases, is unlikely to have any regulatory tooth by itself, however there’s little doubt that it may well have affect on the incoming administration and the way it will decide its budgets.
What Musk and Ramaswamy need, and why it’s harmful
Whereas it’s nonetheless unclear what this fee will appear to be or how huge will probably be, there’s loads of motive to take the menace that it poses significantly. On the marketing campaign path, Musk, who served as a Trump surrogate, promised to seek out $2 trillion that might be eradicated from the federal authorities’s $6.75 trillion finances. And Ramaswamy, who ran in opposition to Trump within the Republican primaries however later campaigned for him, has proposed shedding 75 p.c of the federal workforce and abolishing businesses just like the FBI, IRS, and the Division of Training.
The dimensions of these cuts could be catastrophic. In October, Musk himself stated his plan to slash the federal finances would trigger financial turmoil, trigger markets to crash, and “essentially contain some momentary hardship.” Consultants have additionally stated Musk’s $2 trillion determine is greater than merely aspirational — it’s virtually not possible to seek out that a lot cash to chop with out placing social packages on the chopping board.
“You possibly can’t get to cuts of the scale they’ve been throwing round with out gutting issues folks actually care about and depend on,” Sharon Parrott, president of the Heart on Price range and Coverage Priorities, stated by e-mail.
As my colleague Eric Levitz wrote, if Trump doesn’t minimize Social Safety, Medicare, or protection spending, he would wish to chop different authorities packages by as much as 80 p.c:
That may contain gutting all social companies for low-income People, meals inspections, air security, medical insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments, amongst numerous different issues.
The fee, which Trump stated will conclude its work inside two years, can be riddled with conflicts of curiosity. Musk’s firm SpaceX, for instance, has greater than $10 billion in authorities contracts, and businesses like NASA are already overly depending on it. The federal authorities has additionally been investigating and submitting lawsuits in opposition to Musk’s firms, and Musk himself has typically complained about his firms dealing with an excessive amount of authorities oversight. Now, Musk shall be advising the subsequent president on which businesses he ought to attempt to get rid of.
The “Division of Authorities Effectivity” isn’t essentially a brand new thought
Politicians at all times promise to finish authorities waste, and a frequent goal is the civil service. Beneath the Clinton administration, for instance, Vice President Al Gore led the Nationwide Partnership for Reinventing Authorities, an initiative aimed toward streamlining the federal forms by eliminating pointless jobs and rolling again wasteful spending. Whereas the venture succeeded in some respects, it additionally created dangerous outcomes. The discount within the federal workforce wasn’t particularly nicely focused, and consequently, folks with mandatory and particular abilities left, which made it tougher for the federal government to truly work higher, as promised.
President Ronald Reagan — who in his inaugural handle stated, “Authorities will not be the answer to our downside; authorities is the issue,” — additionally promised a large scaling again of the federal authorities’s attain. He had plans to abolish main authorities businesses, just like the Training and Vitality Departments, and imposed a hiring freeze on the primary day of his administration. However Reagan’s plan to cut back the federal authorities’s footprint failed, and by the point he left workplace, there have been extra folks employed by the federal authorities than when he began.
Trump’s plan to dramatically scale back authorities spending and downsize the federal workforce will probably run into comparable hurdles. A part of the rationale Musk and Ramaswamy may need a tough time discovering legitimately wasteful spending is as a result of the federal workforce hasn’t grown all that a lot. The federal authorities employs about 3 million full-time employees — roughly the identical as within the late Nineteen Sixties. And whereas that quantity is far greater (about 10 million) whenever you take contractors into consideration, that additionally hasn’t modified a lot because the Nineteen Eighties, largely ebbing and flowing however not exponentially rising.
The newly created fee is particularly unlikely to achieve discovering important sources of waste — not less than nowhere close to $2 trillion — as a result of it’s in all probability not going to go after areas of spending that truly want higher accounting, just like the Pentagon, which has failed its audit six years in a row. However that doesn’t imply the fee gained’t advocate any cuts, and the size that Musk and Ramaswamy are hoping for will nearly actually have a destructive influence on the economic system.
So whereas the announcement of the fee may need excited some Republicans and meme-coin buyers, they need to know that if this fee succeeds, there is likely to be a recession on the opposite aspect.
