The two business leaders President-elect Donald Trump has tasked with downsizing the federal bureaucracy say they are “not going to squander” the 2024 election mandate and plan to slash wasteful spending, eliminate unnecessary jobs, and possibly abolish whole federal agencies.
Last Tuesday, Trump called on Tesla founder Elon Musk and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The leaders have said everything is on the table.
“We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” Ramaswamy told Mario Bartiromo on the Fox Business “Sunday Futures.” The department will oversee “massive cuts in federal contractors and others who are over-billing the federal government. So, yes, we expect all of the above, and I think people will be surprised by … how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned a judicial activist ruling establishing the “Chevron deference,” which gave the federal authority vast powers to regulate the private sector.
President Trump has repeatedly promised to abolish the Department of Education, a Carter-era agency many conservatives believe acts as a pay-off to teachers’ unions. “One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and sending all education … back to the states,” said the president-elect in an online video. “They’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse. We spend more money per pupil, by three times, than any other nation, and yet we’re absolutely at the bottom.”
The president cited many education officials’ hostility to Christian precepts as one reason to return education to state, local, and parental control. “The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways, it is resembling an established new religion,” insisted Trump in an “Agenda47” video. “My administration will aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. That’s very simple.”
“Additionally, on day one, we will begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots, and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and that also includes others,” he declared. “Joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power — I will have them fired and escorted from the building. And I will tell Congress that any appropriations bill I sign must reaffirm the president’s ability to remove defiant employees from the job. It’s all about our children.”
Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” that, “when [Trump] eliminates the federal Department of Education, it is going to be tremendous for our states.”
After Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) called proposals to close agencies such as the Department of Education “horrifying,” Ramaswamy stood firm on principle. “Will entire agencies be deleted? Answer: yes,” the founder of Strive Asset Management posted on social media.
Critics say DOGE can begin by reeling in the record-breaking $1 trillion in improper payments made by the Biden-Harris administration, according to the government watchdog group OpenTheBooks.com. Federal guidelines define improper payments as payments “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.”
DOGE will also pare down or eliminate pork-barrel spending and federal boondoggles. On Monday, the official DOGE account on X shared a video of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) revealing some of the most outrageous federal grants of the last year, including:
- $100,000 to study if tequila or gin makes sunfish more aggressive;
- Nearly $1 million to study if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually promiscuous;
- $1.5 million to encourage video gaming in New York. “We might be better off spending $1.5 million to discourage kids from playing video games,” quipped Paul;
- $2 million for a kelp and shellfish nursery in Maine; and
- $750,000 to study whether astronaut Neil Armstrong said it was “one small step for man” or “one small step for a man.” (Armstrong contended to his dying day that he said “a man,” but the study was inconclusive.)
Budget hawks have long held that federal government overreach has created so many duplicative, unnecessary, and indefensible funding streams that the term “government waste” has nearly become redundant. The late Senator William Proxmire gave out “The Golden Fleece Award” every month between March 1975 and December 1988 to highlight wasteful government spending. The late Senator Tom Coburn, who preceded Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) in office, issued an annual “Wastebook” to compile the year’s worst examples of frivolous federal spending. Senator Rand Paul most recent “Festivus Report,” released late each December, catalogued $900 billion in wasteful spending. Citizens Against Government Waste’s 2024 “Congressional Pig Book” listed 8,222 “egregious” earmarks costing taxpayers $22.7 billion.
Even departments performing undeniably constitutional functions of government can become bloated and inefficient, say lawmakers. “The Department of Defense has never passed an audit since they were required to pass an audit, and no one ever gets held accountable,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Monday. “Every year, they’re rewarded with more money and more responsibility.”
Pro-life and pro-family advocates hope “draining the swamp” will also promote the cause of the unborn and the natural family. The Biden-Harris administration spent at least $4.1 billion during its first three years promoting the LGBTQ agenda overseas, often in nations with strong religious and cultural opposition to homosexuality. For instance, a $1 million grant advanced the “social inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) people” in Nigeria, Uganda, and Ukraine. USAID boasted that it requested the “largest-ever budget request, $2.6 billion, to advance gender equity and equality around the world” in 2022.
Any effort to downsize government must include “the insane waste of our tax dollars going to Planned Parenthood (roughly 700 million last year). Abortion has the single largest death toll of any condition, disease, genocide, or act in history, and the American people literally fund it,” explained Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life. The federal government directly funds some abortions through Medicaid, as well as some other federal programs. For instance, the city of St. Louis spent COVID relief funds to promote abortion.
As part of its government spending reforms, the incoming Trump administration plans to reclaim tens of billions of dollars in unspent funds allocated by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which President Joe Biden signed on March 11, 2021. The island territory of Guam had not spent more than one-third of the money received from ARPA as of May. The City of Chicago alone has $300 million in unspent COVID-19 relief funds from ARPA, or 56% of the $540 million in COVID relief funds it received from the bill. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, (population 66,102) still has $760,000 unused funding from the Biden-era legislation.
Trump tapped Elon Musk, who fired approximately 80% of staffers after he bought the social media platform Twitter, now known as X, or about 6,000 employees, yet the company continued to operate effectively. Supporters hope he will do the same in the federal workforce — where firing or even changing the working conditions of federal employees requires navigating a mound of red tape and labor negotiations. Almost 80% of federal employees and managers agreed federal rules “discourage the firing of poor performers” in a Government Business Council survey; only 11% said poor performers were fired. Those singled out for termination may appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), with the average appeal lasting 93 days.
Trump, who often found his policies stymied by “The Resistance” inside his own administration, hopes firing uncooperative workers will allow him to deliver on the will of the voters. In October 2020, President Trump issued an executive order making it easier to fire career bureaucrats, who often resist or slow the implementation of the administration’s policies. President Joe Biden rescinded the “Schedule F” order upon taking office, and in April the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of Personnel Management released a final rule making it even harder to fire federal workers.
Ramaswamy has said he plans to end telework for federal employees. But the president of the largest federal workers union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Everet Kelley, takes the position that any labor condition “changes must be negotiated with the union through the normal collective bargaining process.”
The two unlikely agency leaders have less than two years to enact the president-elect’s government downsizing plans. “Our work is done by July 4, 2026. Unlike every other government project, we don’t want this one to last,” said Ramaswamy.
Trump proposed Musk lead the commission during a speech to the New York Economic Club in September. “I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with completing a complete financial and performance audit of the federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” then-candidate Trump announced. Musk promptly replied he would serve and added, “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.” The department’s acronym, DOGE, is a play on the name of a meme depicting a Shina Ibu dog.
Ramaswamy said that while DOGE will meticulously remove every layer of unnecessary bureaucracy, they respect the many good men and women caught in the downsizing process. “We recognize that the federal bureaucracy is the enemy, while also acknowledging there are millions of good people who work within it. And yes, it’s absolutely possible to dismantle that bureaucracy unsparingly, while also respecting the individual human beings as we do it,” continued Ramaswamy.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration is speeding up the spending process, as its time draws short. President Biden has said he plans to “make every day count” in his lame-duck session, and the Biden-Harris administration has begun expediting federal spending before President-elect Trump can return to office. Administration regulators plan to finalize yet another federal rule transferring student debt from borrowers to taxpayers by December 2, although courts have struck down every previous student loan “forgiveness” program as unconstitutional. The Department of Energy extended a $544 million “loan” to expand and support the failing electrical vehicle industry.
But DOGE can dodge these hurdles, pare back the administrative state, and return the federal government to democratic control, insists Ramaswamy.
“If we don’t downsize the federal government now, it’s never going to happen,” warned Ramaswamy. “This is a historic opportunity. We’re not actually going to squander this.”
AUTHOR
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.
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