CNN
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President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have big ambitions to make the federal government weaker and more efficiently by overhauling its budget and operations from top to bottom.

Musk, the the richest man in the world who owns or runs several companies, warned that his goals — including cutting at least $2 trillion in federal spending — could cause “temporary hardship” before ultimately creating “long-term prosperity.” His remarks have budget pundits scoffing while sending shivers down the spines of many federal workers and those who depend on the federal government for assistance or their livelihood.

Details on how it’s new Department for Government Efficiencyor DOGE, will work — and how Musk and his co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy will avoid conflicts of interest — remain limited. But the two have been outspoken about the areas of government they’d like to see changed, while Trump and Republican lawmakers have a long list of programs and operations they’d like to see reformed.

It’s important to note that while Trump promised the initiative would make “drastic changes,” Musk and Ramaswamy won’t have any direct power to cut spending, make regulatory changes or make other moves. The group will exist outside the government and likely serve to make recommendations to the White House for the president’s annual budget, which outlines the president’s vision, but Congress is not bound to follow it.

Which is what Musk and Ramaswamy said they would aim for

Asked at a town hall on X last month what the initiative’s first steps would be, Musk said there is so much government waste that it would be easy to find targets.

“We as a country obviously have to live within our means,” Musk said, who owns X and is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. “So that’s just looking at every line item, every expense, and saying, ‘Is this necessary?'”

But he also admitted that “everyone gets a haircut here.”

“This necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity,” Musk said.

Musk also took aim Department of Educationa frequent target of Trump and Republicans, criticizing the agency for allegedly indoctrinating children with leftist propaganda and other failures. However, he did not ask for its removal during the mayor’s office.

Meanwhile, Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and former 2024 Republican presidential candidate who has shifted his support to Trump, was more specific about how he would change the federal government.

On the campaign trail, he said he would cut up to 75 percent of the federal workforce. About 2.3 million civilians are employed by the federal government, and nearly 60 percent work for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security.

“Hordes of unelected bureaucrats stifle innovation and ignore the voted wishes of the American people,” Ramaswamy wrote in a white paper.

The plan also called for closing the Department of Education and transferring workforce training programs to the Department of Labor; eliminating the FBI and reassigning the 15,000 special agents who solve cases to other agencies; and getting rid of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and transferring its powers to other departments.

Eliminating waste in government is “a huge undertaking,” said Stephen Moore, Trump’s economic campaign adviser and Heritage Foundation economist.

“DOGE will need hundreds of people to succeed. It’s not just going to be Elon and Vivek,” said Moore, who is not involved in the effort.

A host of budget experts across the political spectrum have questioned the effort’s ability to cut nearly $2 trillion a year in spending, which is more than the federal government has spent on defense, education, veterans health and other discretionary items in last fiscal year. .

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and Glenn Hubbard, a former chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers in the George W. Bush administration, both poured cold water on the idea at an event on Tuesday.

Cutting that much from the federal budget — which totaled about $6.8 trillion in fiscal year 2024 — would require cutting every program by about a third, said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. from the left.

And if social securityMedicare and veterans programs were protected, the rest of the budget could be cut by 62%, affecting defense, food stamps, home heating assistance, housing assistance, food safety inspections and infrastructure, among others.

“$2 trillion a year is such an absurdly large number, it’s impossible,” Kogan said, noting that more than 70 percent of federal government spending (not including interest payments) consists of payments to individuals, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other aid programs. “You can only propose $2 trillion a year if you’re not interested in living in reality, or if you’re completely insensitive to the major deleterious effects it would entail.”

The real savings from reducing waste, fraud and abuse would likely be between $150 billion and $200 billion, said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute. posted on X Tuesday.

“Additional savings beyond that becomes more of an ideological project focused on killing programs you dislike rather than making them more effective,” wrote Riedl, who has also worked for Republican presidential candidates and as chief economist for former Sen. GOP Rob Portman of Ohio. Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” won’t be a real department. It probably won’t even be an office in the White House. It will likely be a private effort that writes a report and sends it to the White House and Congress. Nothing more.”

Congressional Republicans have repeatedly targeted certain government programs and operations for cuts, many of which were also included in Project 2025the conservative plan published by the Heritage Foundation that Trump distanced himself from.

Among the biggest targets were Medicaid, which provides health coverage to lower-income Americans, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act exchanges, which cover about 100 million people in total, said Sharon Parrott, the center’s president. from the left. on budgetary and political priorities.

“The only way to get significant savings close to the dollar level that Republicans have proposed is to take health care away from people,” she said.

Some proponents of the Department of Government Efficiency have compared it to earlier fiscal commissions, particularly the Grace Commission authorized by former President Ronald Reagan in 1982. It was charged with eliminating waste and inefficiency in the federal government.

The commission presented more than 2,500 recommendations to Reagan and Congress, but most — especially those that required legislation — were never implemented, said G. William Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, who served as staff for the Republican from the Senate for 25 years, he wrote for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation last year.

Musk and Ramaswamy’s vast business dealings raise considerable conflict-of-interest concerns if they lead the new initiative. For example, in X’s town hall, Musk repeatedly criticized government regulations, citing their interference with his companies. The two and Trump have all pushed for reduced regulations.

“It’s quite difficult to get regulatory approval,” Musk said while discussing his Start Neuralink which develops implantable brain-computer interfaces. “It’s slowing us down, and I think we should be able to go faster in the US with advanced Neuralink technology and other technologies unrelated to my company.”

Trump’s victory made Elon Musk $15 billion richer

Legal experts told CNN that the effective government entity, based on what is known about it so far, will likely be covered by a federal law that requires transparency and a balance of views on such advisory boards.

Multiple commissions established under the first Trump administration faced litigation under the law, known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, and one of those commissions — set up to study the alleged problem of voter fraud after Trump falsely claimed that millions of they voted illegally in 2016 – it was eventually abolished rather. rather than continuing to fight the cases in court.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to CNN’s questions about whether he thought the new initiative would be to be subject to FACA requirements, but legal experts said that if the president-elect goes through with his plan to run the two foreigners, the law will be difficult to circumvent.

“FACA is usually when the president creates a commission to look at certain issues of interest and concern, so this looks like FACA,” said Jon Greenbaum, an attorney who was involved in FACA litigation during the president’s first term. of Trump and founder. of the legal consulting firm Justice Legal Strategies.

The law has strict transparency mandates that require, among other things, advance notice of hearings, that hearings be accessible to the public, and that the public have a view of the records a commission uses to conduct its work. It also requires that the members of a committee not all be of the same opinion.

“The idea that you can just say, ‘I’m going to give my two rich friends the power to reshape the government and they can do it in secret,’ that’s not how it works,” said Harry Sandick, another lawyer who sued him on Trump. voter fraud commission on behalf of a Democratic commissioner who said he was barred from the commission’s work.