Even tech billionaire Elon Musk sounds surprised by his high perch in Donald Trump’s second administration: “I still can’t believe DOGE is real 🤣🤣,” he wrote Monday, referring to his nascent government efficiency commission. Over the past week, Musk and co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy have begun interviewing staff for their advisory panel, The Washington Post reports, and building alliances with fiscal conservatives across Washington. The pair reportedly lobbied Trump to nominate Russell Vought to lead the White House budget office. They have also hobnobbed with congressional Republicans, recruited like-minded techies to their bureaucracy-slashing cause, and promised a forthcoming podcast dubbed “Dogecast.” “I think it’s actually going to work,” Musk wrote of his efforts on X.
Musk and Ramaswamy have promised to axe as much as $2 trillion in government spending through the advisory panel, named the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, after a meme coin that Musk is heavily invested in. Last week, the pair penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal outlining their plans to slash regulations, reduce federal staff, and audit various federal contracts and grants, including allocations to Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To that end, the Post reports that they’ve begun gathering potential collaborators in Palm Beach and Washington, D.C., including the investor Marc Andreessen, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Musk has also begun targeting specific government programs and employees on his social media platform, X: “So many fake jobs,” he posted last week, above a worker’s name and job title in one obscure federal development office.
Despite Musk’s swaggering rhetoric, it remains unclear how much DOGE can actually accomplish. Federal law sets strict procedures for repealing regulations, likely complicating Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans to nullify “thousands” of them. The two also say they plan to dramatically cut the size of the federal workforce by demanding that remote employees come into the office; Musk took a similar downsizing-by-attrition route at both Tesla and X. But federal employees are unlike tech staffers in many regards: for one thing, roughly a quarter of federal workers belong to unions. And only 10% of them work entirely from home.