Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have co-written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which they lay out their plans for the new Department of Government Efficience (DOGE). The short version is that they plan to "cut the government down to size."

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs...

The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.

Musk and Ramaswamy argue that two recent Supreme Court decisions have changed the game, in particular Loper Bright which overturned the Chevron doctrine, a doctrine which said courts needed to defer to federal regulators' interpretations of their own rulemaking authority. The plan is to have legal experts identify areas for possible savings and then present these to President Trump who can issue executive actions to begin making the cuts. On top of this, DOGE plans to call for reductions in the government workforce commensurate with the reductions in rules and regulations.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.

DOGE also has a plan for a sort of voluntary reduction in force: Demand that government employees show up to work five days a week.

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.

On top of this, DOGE will target spending that the authors argue has gone beyond what Congress authorized or intended.

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.

Be still my beating heart. Are we finally going to defund the left? According to Musk and Ramaswamy they won't just be looking at the left for savings. The Pentagon also needs review, they suggest. What won't be on the chopping block are entitlements. Medicare and Social Security, which make up a huge percentage of the annual budget (35%), can only be saved from insolvency by Congress.

It's too early to tell where this might end up but it sounds like a good faith effort to reduce the scope and size of government. It's a huge agenda and no doubt it will run into equally huge pushback from the left that has benefitted from government funding and unionized government employees for decades.  

Ultimately, DOGE itself will be deleted after finishing its work on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence. That sounds like a great plan but I do wonder if it doesn't give Democratic lawyers a goal to simply delay cuts beyond that date. I expect to see lots of lawsuits in which no one seems to be in a hurry.

Update: Defund Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood spent $40
Million last election cycle to elect Democrats

PP got $670 Million from the government in the last reported year

They are a corrupt partisan group propped up by a corrupt system

This is just the tip of the iceberg@DOGEhttps://t.co/we1zl8eLKy

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) November 21, 2024