Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy aim to scrap “thousands of regulations” and reduce the size of the federal workforce through a new, efficiency-focused government agency.
On November 12, President-elect Donald Trump announced that the two entrepreneurs would lead the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency he said would serve an advisory role to the White House and partner with the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform” within the federal bureaucracy.
In a Wednesday column for The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote: “The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”
Employing “a lean team of small-government crusaders” and using the U.S. Constitution as their “North Star,” the pair said they would target the thousands of government regulations that had been installed through “administrative fiat” and without congressional authorization.
They cited the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which said government agencies must defer to Congress when imposing regulations with significant economic implications, as evidence that the “plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.”
Newsweekcontacted Musk and Ramaswamy via the Trump-Vance transition team for examples of federal regulations that fall within this category.
“DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission,” the pair wrote. “This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”
Preempting the argument that such a process would constitute an unwarranted centralization of power in the executive branch, Musk and Ramaswamy said the move would instead “be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress.”
Doing so, they continued, would allow for “mass head-count reductions” in the federal bureaucracy. They added that they would work to “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.”
Statutory civil service protections have prevented “the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers,” according to Musk and Ramaswamy, who said Trump would nevertheless be able to enact widespread terminations and that requiring federal employees to work in an office five days a week would result in a “wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
Their cost-saving plan would also be enacted by “taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress,” which includes funds going toward the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and grants given to “international organizations” and “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood,” a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care and education.
“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government,” Musk and Ramaswamy concluded. “We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail.”