Elon Musk has become a key advisor to Donald Trump.
He’s going to lead the charge on slashing the size of the federal government.
And Elon Musk has one plan to drain the Swamp that left Democrats scared as hell.
Elon Musk’s DOGE zeroing in on targets in the federal government to cut
President-elect Donald Trump named Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE is tasked with finding wasteful spending and burdensome regulations to cut in the federal government.
Trump named former White House Cabinet Secretary Bill McGinley to serve as an advisor to DOGE.
McGinley will work with the Office of Management and Budget “to provide advice and guidance to end the bloated Federal Bureaucracy.”
Musk and Ramaswamy met with Congressional Republicans to present some of their ideas for cuts in the federal government.
The Tesla CEO told lawmakers he found $2 trillion worth of cuts but didn’t outline where they would come from.
He’s pointed to eliminating entire federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
DOGE has pointed out that Trump could cut spending by refusing to spend money that Congress allocates.
The 1974 Impoundment Control Act prevents the President from not spending money that’s been allocated by Congress.
But the incoming Trump administration thinks that the law is unconstitutional, setting up a potential Supreme Court showdown over it.
Trimming the federal workforce is another top priority
The federal government has more than two million employees and many of them are working remotely at least some of the time.
A Government Accountability Office report from 2023 found that 17 federal agencies were using less than one-quarter of the space at the main offices that year.
DOGE has proposed requiring federal workers to return to working in the office five days a week.
Ending remote work could cut the size of the federal workforce as employees quit rather than return to the office.
Musk and Ramaswamy have also targeted unspent federal money from President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act.
The Biden-Harris administration is trying to hand out as many loans and loan guarantees as possible to green energy companies from money allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act before Trump takes office.
Federal tax credits for electric vehicles and taxpayer subsidies for green energy are on the chopping block next year.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) told Fox News that he’s hoping to work with DOGE to eliminate as many as 75% of federal agencies.
Johnson wanted to eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood and PBS.
“We have the opportunity to go in and really take back control from the administrative state,” Johnson said. “For a long time, they’ve been acting as judge, jury, and executioner on the rules that they make on industries and small business owners and the rest. We have the ingredients, we have the conditions right now to actually be able to make really dramatic change.”
DOGE has pointed to the Supreme Court decisions West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v. Raimondo that limited the scope of regulations issued by federal agencies.
“Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
DOGE’s plan is starting to come together to slash federal spending and regulations.
