Musk wants to slash US government spending by a third, and Ramaswamy wants to cut 75% of the federal workforce. Can they?
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For months, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has been pushing for a department to slash United States government spending.
On November 12, President-elect Donald Trump made his wish come true and announced that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and failed Republican presidential candidate, would lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE appears to be an outside advisory department that will work in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a White House office in charge of helping the sitting president craft budget proposals to bring to Congress. Musk gave the department official government credentials on X, the social media platform he owns.
“From everything we’ve heard now, what Elon and Vivek are proposing to do would be something similar to what the Office of Management and Budget and GAO [Government Accountability Office] does. OMB serves the president specifically to help manage federal agencies across the executive branch. Anything that goes to the president has to go through OMB first. Anything that comes from the president to other agencies has to go through OMB first,” a former senior Trump administration official who declined to be named told Al Jazeera.
Regardless, it would not be an official cabinet position, which would require the formation of a new government agency, which would require congressional approval. The most recent agency to be created was the Department of Homeland Security, which opened its doors in 2003 in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
What is DOGE planning to do?
Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion, or more than a third, of the US government’s annual budget. He said he wants to cut the number of agencies from 428 to 99.
Last week, he shared on X an old interview with Milton Friedman in which the economist lists the government departments that should be scrapped – agriculture, education, commerce – adding, “Milton Friedman was the best,” a post that is being read as things Musk would like to do.
To boost the effort, Trump ally and Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been picked to lead a DOGE subcommittee in the House of Representatives, in which she is to outline plans to fire government employees. The subcommittee has yet to be created.
Musk has acknowledged that the move would create temporary hardships but said it is for long-term prosperity.
“There are a lot of questions that are brought up by his stated goal of streamlining the government and by some of the metrics that he’s put out. [And that’s] before he’s done any of his initial analysis,” Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, told Al Jazeera.
This week, Musk singled out specific government employees, questioning their jobs to his 205 million followers on X, The Wall Street Journal reported, many of whom then followed up with tweets targeting those people.
Musk has oversimplified government programmes to make them sound ridiculous and worthy of cuts but has ignored why these programmes exist. He slammed, for instance, research in which the US government spent $4.5m to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine. However, this is part of a bigger research study into the relationship between alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder, a common issue among military veterans and one the research is trying to find treatment for.
Musk’s willingness to make cuts “just speaks to an arrogance that because you’ve been successful in one domain, that doesn’t mean he can be successful in another domain”, Skeet said.
Musk and Ramaswamy argued that Trump will be able to cut government jobs unilaterally under a policy called Schedule F, an executive order that Trump signed during his first term and never went into effect. It would have reclassified civilian civil servants as at will employees who serve at the pleasure of the president, similar to a political appointment like a cabinet secretary. It would strip job protections from these employees.
Musk has a long record of firing people who are necessary to key functions of his companies, including during his takeover of Twitter when he laid off half its employees, a move that led to systemic failures across the company. As a result of his decisions, the company is now valued at 80 percent less than when he took it over.
Musk has tweeted that DOGE is looking to hire people with high IQs who are willing to work 80 hours a week for no money and will need to buy a subscription to X to apply.
Musk’s appointment is until July 4, 2026, in conjunction with the country’s 250th birthday, according to a Trump team press release. That is also only a few months before midterm elections.
Conflicts of interest
Musk’s appointment comes with significant conflicts of interest. He has claimed on X that his businesses were “smothered by bureaucracy” and DOGE would address that.
Musk’s businesses have billions of dollars in government contracts. SpaceX alone received $3.8bn in government contracts in the 2024 fiscal year, most of which was work for NASA and the Department of Defense, according to government data.
Those contracts include building the propulsion systems NASA uses while another contract is to use Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service provider, to first responders during weather events like the floods in North Carolina.
While SpaceX has the lion’s share of government contracts among Musk’s companies, some of his other firms also earn money from the US government, including Tesla.
In the 2024 fiscal year, Tesla had $6m of government contracts. NASA and the Department of Commerce are the largest awarding agencies for the electric vehicle giant.
“Having somebody who is a beneficiary of government decision-making, you know, in a role to decide which parts of government to streamline, is somebody who is fundamentally conflicted,” Skeet said.
Musk’s conflicts of interest do not just stem from federal contracts but also agencies either investigating or sanctioning him and his businesses. As the co-head of this new agency, he would be in charge of coming up with financial policy decisions that could impact their future funding.
One agency where Musk faces fines and investigations is the National Labor Relations Board, which investigates allegations of union busting and workforce harm. Musk faced complaints for his actions in the overhaul of Twitter, including lawsuits from employees he fired.
Musk also faces a complaint lodged by the United Auto Workers union after his interview with then-candidate Trump in which the two joked about firing striking workers. That case is still open.
The National Transportation Safety Board has pending investigations against Tesla on its self-driving cars, which have been involved in crashes, including one that killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2023.
Musk also has conflicts with the Department of Justice (DOJ), which has been trying to access all data and records pertaining to Trump’s X account as recently as last month as it investigates Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.
Before the November elections, Musk was also accused of breaking federal election laws by the DOJ for a $1m daily giveaway conducted by his political action committee.
In recent days, Senate Democrats have raised concerns about Musk’s calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin as early as 2022 and his sustained connections with high-level Russian officials, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. They have asked the DOJ to determine if Musk should be barred from future involvement in space contracts.
There are other areas of potential conflicts.
During President Joe Biden’s administration, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded Starlink an $885m contract to provide access to rural America, but it was later revoked because the FCC didn’t think Starlink could provide the service. Musk slammed the decision as politically biased.
Now Trump has picked Musk ally Brenden Carr to lead the commission. Carr is the top Republican on the FCC, who disagreed with the decision to deny Starlink the contract. He also wrote the chapter on the FCC in the conservative policy playbook for a second Trump term, Project 2025.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is also a thorn in Musk’s side. As recently as September, the agency planned to sanction him for not showing up to testify for a second time over his acquisition of Twitter and rejected his proposal to pay a $2,923 fine for missing the deposition.
But arguably, Musk’s conflicts of interest are neither unique to him nor are they new to Washington.
Last year, an investigative report from the outlet Insider found that 78 members of Congress had not properly disclosed personal financial trades, which is required by law. The law is meant to combat issues like insider trading.
Musk did not say whether he would divest before joining the government or serve as an outside adviser. He also did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for clarification.
At the same time, some of Trump’s policies might also negatively impact Musk.
“From everything that President Trump has said, it sounds like he will be very tough on China, which will then serve Elon Musk poorly. He gets a lot of his materials that he needs for his different companies from China,” the former senior Trump administration official who spoke to Al Jazeera said.
Tesla, for example, reportedly gets roughly 40 percent of its materials from China. Trump’s proposed tariffs on the country could be as high as 60 percent.
In case the tariffs do kick in, “I don’t think it’s all necessarily going to be good for Elon as an adviser,” the official added.
Can Musk actually serve?
Given all of these factors, can Musk actually serve as head of DOGE under his current arrangements with Tesla, X and SpaceX?
Ethics experts suggested they should be disqualifying.
“What’s happening here is problematic. Elon Musk has built-in obvious conflicts of interest because the companies that he is associated with have relationships with the very government that he is now going to come in and try to make more efficient,” Skeet said.
Legal experts, however, said it’s a bit more of an open question.
Advisory committees whether for a federal agency or the president fall under a specific law that requires they make public their actions and meetings so the public can participate, explained Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center. But “it’s not clear that [DOGE] will fall under those transparency requirements of the law that applies to most advisory committees,” he said.
That law is called the Federal Advisory Committee Act and requires that nongovernmental experts who provide federal agencies with advice publicly disclose their recommendations. Musk said on X he would do that.
“In most situations where an official has a conflict of interest, there is a rule that can be enforced to stop that conflict of interest. In this situation, it is not clear yet whether or not there are any rules that could prohibit these conflicts,” Payne said.
But with few specifics on how DOGE will be set up, there’s not a lot that can be said about the legal options, Payne pointed out.
The Trump transition team, which did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment, has publicly said it is compliant with all laws.
