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The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Last week, Donald Trump announced that self-christened first buddy Elon Musk will head a newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. The assignment is an obvious reward for Musk’s extensive support of the president-elect’s campaign, deepening the world’s richest man’s already considerable influence over the federal government. As The New York Times notes, Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion after inking nearly 100 different contracts with 17 federal agencies last year.
It’s safe to assume that these contracts will be exempt from the initiative’s mission to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”—supposedly a long-held goal of conservatives and their private-sector allies. While targeting the jobs of career public servants, Musk aims to staff the initiative with “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
It’s similarly reasonable to suspect that Musk is a large holder of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which he regularly hypes; hence the decision to name the initiative DOGE to keep the coin in the news cycle for the next couple of years. Considering the irrational nature of meme coins and Musk’s promise of affiliated merchandise, the attention from the appointment alone could easily net a relatively modest wealth increase; the price of Dogecoin is already growing.
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While details of the enterprise are still vague, Musk and Ramaswamy have made a number of pledges that would be disastrous for almost every American. These include Musk’s vow to cut $2 trillion in federal spending over an amorphous time frame, and Ramaswamy’s call to eliminate allocations to programs with expired authorizations such as veterans’ health care, which lapsed in 1998.
One wonders if Musk and Ramaswamy have even a passing familiarity with the federal budget. The only possible way to achieve Musk’s cost-cutting goals would be to take a wrecking ball to entitlement programs, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The budget for federal discretionary spending, which is determined annually in the congressional appropriations process, was $1.6 trillion in fiscal year 2024, or about 26 percent of spending. Even...