The project plans to cut roughly $2 trillion from the federal budget, or 30 percent of annual government spending.
President-elect Donald Trump is set to launch the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he introduced during a pre-election interview on billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform, X.
Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will co-chair the effort, which aims to slash $2 trillion from the roughly $6.75 trillion federal budget, hack through a labyrinth of executive branch regulations, and reform or remove entire federal agencies.
They would also seek to sharply reduce the number of government bureaucrats “proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified,” the duo wrote in a Nov. 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies,” Trump wrote in a statement.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”
How they might accomplish that effort, however, is unclear, experts told The Epoch Times. Especially because the department—which Trump said will serve in an advisory capacity to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—may encounter roadblocks in its mandate to “drive large-scale structural reform.”
Here is a breakdown of what the new efficiency department is, what its goals are, and what to expect from the project moving forward.
The Scope of DOGE
Trump said that DOGE will make “changes to the federal bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency” to “drive out the massive waste and fraud” in the federal government’s multi-trillion dollar annual spending.
Although it has the word “department” in its name, DOGE is not a federal agency like the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which audits the federal government for Congress.
“Trump has made clear that DOGE is an advisory board operating outside the federal government,” Jordan Haring, the director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum, told The Epoch Times. “Thus, unlike federal agencies, it does not need to be formally enacted through an act of Congress.”
By Jacob Burg
