'Department of Government Efficiency' faces daunting task

By Rob Garver

When President-elect Donald Trump takes office for the second time in January, two of his highest-profile supporters will be handed the keys to a new operation designed to slash government spending and improve its performance.

The Department of Government Efficiency, which, despite its name, will likely be an advisory committee rather than an actual department, will be co-chaired by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and wealthy former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy.

The operation’s name, which can be reduced to the acronym DOGE, pronounced like “dohj,” appears to be a product of Musk’s sense of humor. The world’s richest man, Musk has long been a proponent of a fringe cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin.

Musk and Ramaswamy have set July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — as the target date for completing their work, which is expected to reach into all corners of the sprawling U.S. government in search of spending to cut and bureaucracy to eliminate.

Big promises

In a statement announcing the creation of DOGE, Trump said it “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”

Musk has publicly speculated that it should be possible to identify some $2 trillion in potential cuts to the federal budget. That would represent nearly one-third of the $6.1 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2023 and could not be accomplished without drastic reductions in government services and programs.

Ramaswamy has indicated that such cuts are precisely what he and Musk will be suggesting. In an appearance on Fox News this Sunday, he was asked if they intend to shut down entire government departments.

He replied, “We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts, among federal contractors and others, who are overbilling the federal government.”

He added, “I think people will be surprised by how quickly we're able to move with some of those changes.”

First since Reagan

Organizations that press for closer oversight of federal spending were cautiously optimistic about the creation of DOGE.

Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, told VOA that DOGE will be “the first significant and comprehensive private sector review of the federal government” since President Ronald Reagan created the Grace Commission, a committee to recommend improvements to government efficiency, in 1982.

How impactful DOGE will ultimately be, Schatz said, will depend on a number of factors outside the commission’s control.

“It all depends on what President Trump does with the recommendations,” Schatz said. “Recommendations have to be implemented, either through executive orders or legislation … but it takes leadership, and it takes really Congress, in many cases, to carry out the recommendations.”

In a statement released after Trump announced the creation of DOGE, Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, praised the idea behind the effort, but warned that it would take bipartisan cooperation to see real changes implemented.

“Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas,” MacGuineas said. “The recommendations will need congressional buy-in, further emphasizing the need for this to be an effort reaching across the aisle and leaving all options on the table to address our fiscal imbalances.”

Massive budget

The commission overseen by Musk and Ramaswamy will be applying its scrutiny to a federal budget in which much of the government’s outlays are dedicated to what is known as “mandatory” spending.

Mandatory spending is made up of payments that the government is obligated by law to make, and in 2023 that accounted for $3.8 trillion of the $6.1 trillion budget.

The largest single line item was $1.3 trillion paid out by Social Security, the federal program that provides income to retirees, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The government spent another $448 billion on income support payments for other Americans, including the unemployed and low-income parents. Spending on Medicare, the health care program for older Americans was $839 billion, while spending on Medicaid, which supports health care for low-income Americans was $616 billion.

A second major category of spending is considered “discretionary.” These are payments that Congress authorizes with each budget cycle, and they accounted for $1.7 trillion in spending in 2023.

Discretionary spending funds the day-to-day operation of the federal government, with nearly half — $805 billion in 2023 — going to the defense budget. The remaining $917 billion funds the major government departments, Congress and the White House, and other functions of the government.

A final major category, interest on the federal debt, exists in a gray area between mandatory and discretionary spending. While the government can theoretically choose not to service its debt, the decision to do so could be catastrophic for the U.S. and global economies. Debt service accounted for $659 billion in spending in 2023.

Structure unclear

It remains unclear exactly how DOGE will be structured. If it is established by an executive order, it could be subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. That law requires certain steps be taken to ensure transparency and has rules regarding conflicts of interest.

The latter could be problematic for Musk, whose various companies have billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the federal government.

However, if DOGE is constituted as a wholly private enterprise, whose leaders just happen to have the ear of the president, those rules would not apply.