For those who believe that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was a make-work job given by the new president to make the tech billionaires happy, you're in a for a rude awakening.
This is serious business and the two men who have a mandate from Donald Trump to cut and cut until the government howls and are not about to let an historic opportunity go to waste. Elon Musk has already chosen his first target: remote and hybrid work.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Musk and Ramaswamy said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The COVID-era panacea has hollowed out city centers and destroyed businesses. A General Accounting Service (GA) study published this week said "increased telework helped some agencies recruit and retain employees — although pay and workload played a bigger role in hiring," according to the Federal News Network.
Yes, but are they more productive? “The data is really on the side of those few that are able to work remotely. The data says that more work is being done,” Everett Kelly, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees said in a C-Span interview. What else is the president of the union going to say?
The point isn't to fire people but rather to save money. Musk suggests a simple formula to determine how many federal employees should be let go,“The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified,” he argued.
And the number of federal regulations cut is going to be huge. One ripe target is the federal procurement process.
The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.
What's very clear is that Musk and Ramaswamy have put a great deal of thought into this project. He wants to hire "the sharpest technical and legal minds in America." If he's half as successful in doing that as he has been in hiring at Space X, DOGE should do very well.
Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.
Musk may be one of the only government managers in history to work toward the elimination of his job. "Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set for our project." Musk added, There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud."
That's an excellent goal for DOGE to work toward.
