The businessmen tasked by President-elect Donald Trump to reduce the size of the United States Government have flagged “mass headcount reductions” and US$500 billion of annual savings.
The world’s richest person Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said they would advise the newly formed department that they had been asked to lead, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to cut the Government down to size.
They would advise DOGE to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings, and assist the transition team to hire a team of small-government crusaders.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy said two Supreme Court rulings suggested a plethora of current federal regulations exceeded the authority Congress had granted under the law.
Most legal edicts were not laws enacted by Congress but tens of thousands of “rules and regulations” promulgated each year by unelected bureaucrats.
“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” they wrote.
DOGE intended to work with appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required for an agency to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.
Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations.
Employees whose positions were eliminated deserved to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal was to support their transition into the private sector, give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments.
They also wrote DOGE would be “taking aim” at the $500 billion-plus in annual expenditure that was unauthorised by Congress or used in ways that Congress never intended.
Their top goal was to eliminate the need for DOGE’s existence by 4 July 2026, the expiration date for the project.
“There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.
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