A new era of successfully cutting spending and regulations could be dawning with the government department that isn’t really a department.
After Elon Musk asserted during the 2024 campaign that he could eliminate at least $2 trillion of unnecessary federal spending, the once and future President Donald Trump gave the world’s richest man two things: a partner in billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the green light to make the savings happen.
Thus, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was born.
“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 said in announcing an ambitious agenda for the DOGE, which he described as “potentially the Manhattan Project of our time.”
The starting point for any effort to reduce the size and cost of government is twofold: the 92,786 pages of regulations listed in the Federal Register and the federal budget—which in 2024 was $6.75 trillion, including $4.92 trillion in revenues collected, and an annual deficit of $1.83 trillion.
Musk and Ramaswamy say they will emphasize the elimination of unneeded, outdated, and too-costly federal regulations on the assumption that fewer regulations will require fewer civil servants to administer them.
Sharply reducing regulations will boost economic growth, but cutting back or eliminating wasteful spending will draw intense opposition from Congress and the special interests that benefit from the multiplicity of government programs.
The most recent year in which the annual federal budget was balanced was 2016, the last year of President Barack Obama’s administration. The budget was also balanced in the three previous years, largely because of the tea party movement, which in 2010 elected a Republican House majority and a generation of aggressive young conservative spending hawks in the Senate.
According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the five biggest expenditures in the 2024 federal budget are $1.46 trillion for Social Security, $912 billion for various health care programs, $882 billion for net interest on the $35 trillion national debt, $874 billion for Medicare, and $874 billion for the national defense budget.
