Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out their road map for running the Department of Government Efficiency on Wednesday, explaining the authority they believe they have and the goals they hope to achieve.
President-elect Donald Trump selected the pair to lead the new department, which aims to cut costs within the federal government.
Here are the top four things Musk and Ramaswamy want the country to know about their new outfit.
Entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats
The pair emphasized that they aren’t officials and will serve as outside volunteers.
“That’s why we’re doing things differently,” they wrote. “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”
Ramaswamy and Musk said they are assembling “a lean team of small-government crusaders” to work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. They are aiming to seek three kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings.
Relying on the rule of law
“We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws,” they said.
“Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure,” the pair wrote, referring to West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024).
The pair of Supreme Court cases “suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.”
Musk and Ramaswamy plan to present a list of regulations to Trump they believe are unnecessary. The president-elect would then use his executive power to “pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.”
The pair said they expect backlash alleging an overreach from Trump for these moves, but they said the regulations were never authorized by Congress to begin with.
If the regulations are rescinded, a future president would have to ask Congress to reinstate them, they said.
Shrinking the federal workforce
The duo have also set their sights on reducing the number of people the federal government employs. One quick way to ensure some voluntary compliance would be to force government workers back to the office five days a week, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.
“If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they said.
For larger-scale personnel shifts, DOGE plans to advise Trump to issue other “rules governing the competitive service” that would allow him to “curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area.”
Cut costs and deliver savings
At the heart of the department is a goal to cut costs and deliver savings for voters. DOGE plans to ask the Supreme Court if the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress, is unconstitutional. That would allow Trump to cut spending via executive action.
Without it, the DOGE leaders said they could still target funds that were not authorized by Congress or were being used in ways that Congress didn’t intend. They named funds delivered to Planned Parenthood or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as possible cuts.
Musk and Ramaswamy also hope to conduct large-scale audits they believe would result in savings. The Pentagon, which just failed its seventh consecutive audit, would be a prime target for reform, they said.
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The two noted DOGE is set to be backed up by “a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court” and expects to complete its task, which is due on the United States’s 250th anniversary on July 4, 2026.
“We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington,” they said. “We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.”
