Good luck, Department of Government Efficiency

What did Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy do to deserve this? 

They campaigned diligently for Donald Trump, defended his most controversial ideas, and even, in Musk’s case, tried to promote Trump-supported policies via a $1 million voter sweepstakes. 

Their reward? Being put in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency. It only sounds like a Cabinet department. In reality, it’s a fancy name for yet another blue-ribbon commission to examine how to make government smaller, better and less expensive. Presumably unintentionally, it also calls to mind the fake government agencies like the United States Business Regulations Department that scammers invoke to try to fleece consumers and businesses.

Ramaswamy does not think small when it comes to cutting government. During his brief run for the Republican nomination, he vowed to slash 75% of the federal workforce, relying on a novel interpretation of personnel laws and regulations that he says enables the president to act swiftly and with minimal oversight to lay off employees by the thousands.

“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” said Ramaswamy after DOGE was unveiled. “We expect mass reductions-in-force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.” 

Musk is no stranger to such an approach, having slashed three-quarters of the workforce at Twitter after he bought the company. But when it comes to cutting government spending, Musk has a rather large conflict of interest. Two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, are major government contractors. 

Now Musk and Ramaswamy are supposed to turn their attention to improving a government whose sheer size and diverse missions makes it difficult to change. Also, its legal and regulatory framework is organized around the principles of fairness and effectiveness, not efficiency.

Nevertheless, Trump has promised DOGE will complete a thorough overhaul of the federal colossus by July 4, 2026, as a 250th birthday present to the country. The effort could be the “Manhattan Project of our time,” Trump says—but he rather pointedly doesn’t promise that it will be. And the irony, of course, is that the Manhattan Project was an effort to spend money in pursuit of a governmental goal, not cut it.

At its inception, DOGE seems an awful lot like myriad other efforts over the years to highlight allegedly wasteful government spending—almost all of which ends up being in the category of domestic discretionary funding that doesn’t add up to much in the broader scheme of things. Musk says DOGE will “have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.” (He also added, cheerily, “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!”)

A list of wasteful programs sounds less like a revolution and more like the latest in a long line of government efficiency commissions and reports. Musk and Ramaswamy could save themselves some time and just compile the studies of the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government crusade, George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda, and dozens of Government Accountability Office reports. (They could even simply cut, paste and change the fonts on the report of cost savings generated by Joe Biden’s Campaign to Cut Waste during the Obama administration, and see if anyone noticed.) 

True government reform efforts require hard, sustained effort and commitment from the top. And second presidential terms is where they go to die. Lame duck presidents—and Trump will be one the day he takes his second oath of office—usually lose interest in management improvement and reorganization initiatives. There’s little political payoff from them in the short term, and they require expending substantial political capital.

Musk and Ramaswamy may be in for this for the long haul, and Trump may be willing to push the envelope on unilaterally slashing government. But what’s more likely to emerge is a strongly worded report and reliance on tried-and-true methods—attrition-based workforce reductions, employee buyouts and limited budget freezes—to bolster the claim of reducing government.