Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have called the federal bureaucracy an “existential threat to our republic.” Now, President-elect Donald J. Trump is empowering them to drastically shrink it, by whatever means necessary.David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, discusses their plans — and what it would look like if they were actually carried out.Guest: David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has advantages that past budget cutters did not, but laws and court challenges could still make change slow and difficult.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the main goal of the Department of Government Efficiency?
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily.
Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have called the federal bureaucracy a, quote, existential threat to our republic.
We're going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.
Now, President-elect Trump is empowering them to drastically shrink it by whatever means necessary.
America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is going to be amazing.
Today, my colleague David Fahrenthold examines their plans and what it would look like if they actually carried them out. It's Wednesday, December 4th. So, David, you've been doing some reporting on plans by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to cut government to the tune of $2 trillion. You're trying to understand exactly what this effort is and how it would work. Tell me what you're finding.
Well, we're talking about this thing called the Department of Government Efficiency. Those of you who are on the Internet may know that that's a meme. It's named after a funny dog meme that Elon Musk likes.
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Chapter 2: How do Musk and Ramaswamy plan to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget?
And a cryptocurrency, apparently.
and a cryptocurrency that's named after the funny dog meme. Now, there's no thing in the government called the Department of Government Efficiency, but it is something that President Trump has pledged to set up once he takes office. And what they're talking about is kind of a hybrid setup where there would be people outside the government, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk,
These sort of advisors on the outside taking no government salary, holding no government position. And then a bunch of folks on the inside, people who actually would work for the government. Musk has described them as sort of committed, smart government, you know, budget cutters. And together, their goal is pretty massive.
They talked about, as you said, cutting about $2 trillion from the federal budget. You know, the numbers like that can get kind of abstract at that size. But what that really means is about a third of the federal budget they want to cut. And they also want to make huge cuts to regulation, to the number of regulations, to the size of the regulatory state.
Now, it's important to note that there is fat in the federal government. There is potentially room to cut it. But the thing they're taking on, it's really not just in numbers, but in sort of effort, is going to be a massive task.
So basically, very, very big promises. But, you know, to be kind of real about this, I think anyone who stood in line that DMV could get behind the idea that a more efficient government, as they say that they want to make, makes sense. I mean, you know, efficiency is a hard concept to argue with, right?
Right. It's hard to argue with the idea that those government processes could be made more efficient. And on paper, Elon Musk is a really good person to put in charge of efficiency.
He has many areas of success, but the thing that he has done best over his career is process engineering, taking a process like assembling a car, assembling a rocket, building a thing, and making that process run faster, smoother, cheaper.
I mean, the way he changed the assembly process for Teslas particularly, and for SpaceX, there's a reason why his companies build those things faster than others. So he is a great expert in efficiency, at least in that kind of efficiency, sort of manufacturing efficiency. In fact, this whole thing, the whole doge, I mean, as you could probably tell from the name, this is Elon's idea.
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Chapter 3: What are the proposed methods for cutting regulations?
And the idea that the Supreme Court laid out in the 80s was that if a federal agency makes a rule, it takes an idea that Congress laid out and then sort of makes it more specific, promulgates a rule for people to abide by. if somebody challenges that rule and says, hey, this rule is wrong or it doesn't comport with what Congress wanted, that the court should defer to the judgment of the agency.
The idea being that the agency has experts that they may know better than the courts, that they should defer to the judgment of the agency unless it's really egregious.
So the power of the federal government is kind of present there because the court defers to what the federal agency says the rule is. But SCOTUS changed that in the past few terms.
They did. So the Supreme Court got rid of that. And what they said instead was, no, courts should just be able to use their own judgment.
The agencies don't deserve any sort of special deference that if somebody challenges a rule in court, that the court should be able to use their own judgment about whether that rule was reasonable or not without going from a starting point that the agency might be right. So the way that Musk and Ramaswamy want to use this is to say, OK, well, now we're going to go back into federal government.
And with the help of the folks who work inside government, we're going to identify a whole bunch of rules that we believe are wrong. Now that we think there's more freedom to challenge federal rules, we're going to find all kinds of federal rules we think are overreaching or don't follow the original intent of Congress or unconstitutional.
And we're just going to start identifying those and tell President Trump, hey, stop enforcing these rules. Don't enforce them. And we'll start the formal process to take them off the books. And that once you stop enforcing rules and start taking those rules off the books, their idea is, well, you won't need as many federal workers to enforce those rules because there's less rules to enforce.
And you won't need as much spending because there'll be fewer workers to pay for.
So basically their argument is that they have this magic wand that they can just wave and stop enforcing federal regulations. What else do they say they're going to do?
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Chapter 4: What challenges do Musk and Ramaswamy face in their plan?
He wants to spend a lot of the military. I don't sense a lot of appetite from him to shrink the military budget in any sort of significant way.
Nor presumably would Musk want to cut contracts that he himself receives from the federal government. That is also part of this. So what else are we talking about here that's off limits?
Well, it's important to note that we are running huge budget deficits as a country and that a lot of the federal budget, about 10%, is just paying interest on money we already borrowed. So nobody's excited about this spending. Nobody gets any benefit out of this spending. But we already agreed to pay these debts.
And if you stopped paying interest now, you'd save a lot of money for about five minutes. And then the country would default and interest rates would go up and the economy would be shattered. It would not help any of Trump's political goals to stop paying interest on the debt. Yeah.
Chapter 5: How has Trump's stance on Medicare and Social Security influenced budget cuts?
Chapter 6: What historical attempts have been made to cut government spending?
Chapter 7: What role does efficiency play in government reform?
I mean, the way he changed the assembly process for Teslas particularly, and for SpaceX, there's a reason why his companies build those things faster than others. So he is a great expert in efficiency, at least in that kind of efficiency, sort of manufacturing efficiency. In fact, this whole thing, the whole doge, I mean, as you could probably tell from the name, this is Elon's idea.
Donald, great to speak.
There was actually a recording of it happening. Musk is interviewing Trump in August on X, Musk's social media platform.
I mean, I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things. And Musk says, hey, you know, I think we should have this commission. And I'd be happy to help out on such a commission if it were formed.
Well, you, you're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say. You want to quit?
Then Trump says, oh, yeah, sure, we'll do that. So this is Musk's idea. And so he's the one who sort of planted this idea. And he's really focused on it since Trump was elected.
I appreciate it. I'll see you soon.
All right. Sounds good. Thank you.
Thank you, Elon.
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