Musk and Ramaswamy vow ‘mass head-count reductions’ in the U.S. government

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy vowed “mass head-count reductions” to the federal government in an opinion piece Wednesday that sketched out their vision for President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” in the greatest detail so far.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy laid out their plans to slash federal regulations, cut government spending and significantly reduce the number of federal employees. Trump tapped the two with running the DOGE initiative last week, but basic questions about the effort - including its goals, operations and authorities - have primarily remained a source of speculation.

While their essay left much unclear, tech entrepreneur Musk and Ramaswamy - a former 2024 GOP presidential rival of Trump’s - began to articulate the legal and procedural steps by which they plan to transform federal operations.

The DOGE commission, they wrote, will first “work with legal experts embedded in government agencies” to identify regulations that Trump can repeal. That effort will rely on “advanced technology,” they said, a potential reference to artificial intelligence.

Musk and Ramaswamy argued that recent cases decided by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will enable major reductions in federal regulations. After Trump “nullifies thousands of such regulations,” DOGE will then work with “embedded appointees” across federal agencies to “identify the minimum number of employees” required for an agency to perform its essential functions. This line appeared to echo Musk’s broader business philosophy and past practices; Musk oversaw the reduction of roughly 80 percent of the staff of Twitter, the social media platform he later renamed X, after he bought it.

The DOGE leaders suggested that Trump can unilaterally slash the number of federal employees because many of them will no longer be necessary once the regulations are eliminated.

“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” they wrote. They added that “the number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified.”

Musk and Ramaswamy did not specify the number of federal employees they envision being cut under their effort. They wrote that “existing laws” can give federal employees “incentives for early retirement” and voluntary severance payments to “facilitate a graceful exit.”

These proposals could affect not just scores of federal operations but also the Washington area, which is home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

To reduce federal spending, Musk and Ramaswamy also proposed eliminating programs that Congress funds but where specific spending authorization has lapsed, an idea that would ax critical measures including veterans’ health care, initiatives at the State and Justice departments and NASA, and multiple major antipoverty programs.

That idea, some budget experts said, demonstrates the pair’s misunderstanding of how the government works. Funding authorizations are often pro forma exercises; approving funding without official reauthorizations is one way Congress has found to operate more efficiently.

Questions also abound about how they would cut federal regulations. Musk and Ramaswamy signaled they would conduct a broad federal review to expunge regulations deemed to be overreaching.

To justify their efforts, they pointed to a series of recent Supreme Court rulings that sharply curtailed federal power - including the justices’ decision to revoke a decades-old legal precedent, known as the Chevron doctrine, that had afforded agencies broad policymaking latitude. But the duo did not elaborate on how, exactly, they would accomplish their aim, which is fraught with legal questions and political challenges.

In the op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy said “large-scale audits” during “temporary suspension of payments” could yield savings, although they didn’t articulate what that would entail.

The op-ed embraces a dramatic change in the balance of power over spending. Trump’s aides have planned to challenge a 1974 budget law that limits the president’s ability to cease spending on federal programs without congressional approval. If the Supreme Court agrees, the White House would dramatically expand its ability to cut programs unilaterally.

“Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.

They also suggested reprising an effort that faded out at the end of Trump’s first term.

In the waning weeks of Trump’s first administration, the White House moved forward a controversial policy that would have allowed the president to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. Russell Vought, then the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and others in the administration believed that career employees across the government were resisting their policies and sought to remove the job projections that have long accompanied the modern federal bureaucracy.

Trump officials focused the effort on mid-and high-ranking professionals in policymaking roles whom they said were impossible to fire, protected by long-standing civil service rules. Each agency would identify career employees to shift into a new job category known as Schedule F.

Implementation of the new policy, mandated by an executive order the White House issued less than two weeks before Election Day in 2020, accelerated at the White House budget office. OMB officials sent a list of roles identified by Vought’s staff to the federal personnel agency for final sign-off. The list made up 88 percent of the workforce, 425 analysts and other experts who would shift into Schedule F. President Joe Biden killed the executive order on his first day in office.

Trump vowed during his campaign to reinstate Schedule F it he took back the White House, and Vought seems positioned to overturn the rule and lead the charge once more. The Musk and Ramaswamy op-ed did not mention Schedule F by name, though the intent appears largely similar.

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Tony Romm and Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.