What to Expect from D.O.G.E.

Making predictions in today’s political climate is a fool’s errand. In fact, earlier this year I made perhaps the worst prediction of my career thus far when I wrote for another publication that I expected that the June 27th presidential debate between President Biden and former President Trump would do little to move the needle, one way or another.

Of course, the president went on to display his severe mental decline, for all the world to see, and days later his exit from the presidential race changed the course of modern American politics. At the risk of making another profoundly embarrassing error, I would like to take a look at Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s yet to be created Department of Government Efficiency, and what the duo can realistically expect to accomplish, working within the incoming Trump administration.

D.O.G.E. is a creation of the mercurial billionaire Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame. Musk, who ingratiated himself with President-elect Trump after throwing his support and his immense wealth behind the former president’s 2024 campaign, received Trump’s blessing to lead this new endeavor and chose to bring in fellow Republican billionaire and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as a partner. The pair have reached out to the king of efficiency himself, former Texas Congressman Ron Paul to serve in an advisory role, as well.

At face value, D.O.G.E. is a terrific idea. The federal government is nothing, if not inefficient. The U.S. national debt recently surpassed $36 Trillion, and the government ended fiscal year 2024 with a $1.8T cumulative deficit. Surely, there are many items within the federal budget that can be reformed or eliminated entirely; and with multiple entitlement programs—most notably Social Security and Medicare Part A—barreling towards insolvency, the need for massive, wide-ranging reform at the federal level is more important now than ever.

In a November op-ed with the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy laid out the necessity for D.O.G.E. “Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress, but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.”

Fact-check: true. Americans who support balanced budgets, low taxes, and fiscal sanity generally can find little disagreement with Musk, Ramaswamy, and the goals of their new project. But how will it work? D.O.G.E. will not be a federal executive department, as the creation of new departments require an act of Congress, and it will likely operate under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The department’s role will presumably be to advise Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regarding the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget.

The very reasons that make the creation of D.O.G.E. necessary are the main impediments to its potential success. The U.S. federal government has not had a balanced budget since 2001, and President Trump has repeatedly refused to even entertain the possibility of reforming the nation’s failing entitlement programs, which make up more than 55% of the federal budget. Progressive outlet Vox Media has gloated, likely accurately that D.O.G.E. is “unlikely to have any regulatory teeth on its own, but there’s little doubt that it can have influence on the incoming administration and how it will determine its budgets.”

Will it be enough? Perhaps not, but considering the American electorate’s rejection of economically literate candidates in recent years, and the rise of economic populism on the political Right which has steered the Republican Party more in the direction of Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) than Rand Paul (R-KY) on economics, influencing the incoming administration and educating voters on the fiscal realities of government may be the best that free marketeers and fiscal conservatives can hope for. Musk and Ramaswamy do have the ear of the 47th president, and with Musk’s recent purchase of the social media giant Twitter (now X), censorious actions by corporate and social media companies can no longer prevent the dissemination of information that threatens the status quo. With the ear of the president, and the influence X currently has with members of Congress, it is possibly—albeit unlikely—that sound fiscal recommendations married with public pressure on social media can bring Republicans to the table on economic reform, at least as long as the GOP controls both houses of Congress.

Support for D.O.G.E. has come from a few unlikely places thus far. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong have expressed support for the project. Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) have shown interest in working with D.O.G.E. to cut defense spending. “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,” said Sanders.

I am under no illusion that Musk and Ramaswamy will be able to convince the president and Congress to make the cuts and reforms necessary to balance the budget and hack away at the entrenched federal bureaucracies, much less eliminate some of them altogether; but progress is possible. If any major reforms are made that allow American taxpayers to keep more of their hard-earned money, D.O.G.E. will have been a success. Our nation’s fiscal house is on fire, and with skyrocketing debt at home and an increasingly dangerous landscape internationally, any attempts to steer the ship back to fiscal sanity should be applauded, not mocked. We are over $36T in debt; if not now, when?