President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that billionaire Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy will head up a new temporary agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump in a statement said the two “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
Trump seemed to suggest that Musk and Ramaswamy might not formally join the government, explaining that the two would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.”
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In his own statement, Musk said the new agency “will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!
Trump, in his statement, set a deadline for their work, saying it would “conclude no later than July 4, 2026.”
“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Trump wrote. “I am confident they will succeed!”
The Trump campaign described the agency as “potentially, the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time,” referencing the secret World War II program that was involved in developing the atomic bomb.
Musk was a major part of Trump’s reelection campaign effort, while Ramaswamy ran against Trump in the Republican primary before endorsing him.
The department’s acronym, DOGE, is also a dog meme that inspired Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency promoted by Musk that was created as a joke and is credited with being the first meme coin.
It’s not clear how the organization will operate. It could come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which dictates how external groups that advise the government must operate and be accountable to the public.
Federal employees are generally required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations.
Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since Trump won the presidential election.
The president-elect has often said he would give Musk a formal role overseeing a group akin to a blue-ribbon commission that would recommend ways to slash spending and make the federal government more efficient. Musk at one point suggested he could find more than $2 trillion in savings — nearly a third of total annual government spending.
Trump had made clear that Musk would likely not hold any kind of full-time position, given his other commitments.
“I don’t think I can get him full-time because he’s a little bit busy sending rockets up and all the things he does,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in September. “He said the waste in this country is crazy. And we’re going to get Elon Musk to be our cost cutter.”
