Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday unveiled their plans for President-elect Donald Trump’s government efficiency panel, saying they will identify thousands of regulations to eliminate that will justify “mass head-count reductions.”
In a column for The Wall Street Journal, the tech entrepreneurs picked to lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote that 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” who view themselves as immune from firing.
“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” they wrote. “DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.”
They wrote that the panel’s goal is to help support any employee whose job has been eliminated to transition into the private sector.
“The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit,” they wrote.
Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla, X and SpaceX, and Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire businessman who challenged Trump in the Republican presidential primaries, addressed arguments about civil service protections that could block Trump from firing federal workers.
“The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation,” they wrote. “But the statute allows for ‘reductions in force’ that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to ‘prescribe rules governing the competitive service.’ That power is broad.
“With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area.”
They wrote the panel can cut $500 billion-plus in annual federal expenditures unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, citing $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations, and nearly $300 million to progressive groups such as Planned Parenthood.
They pointed to two recent Supreme Court decisions to justify streamlining the federal government: West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v Raimondo.
In the former, the justices held in a 6-3 decision in 2022 that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions without congressional authorization. In the latter, also a 6-3 decision made in June, the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority.
“Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law,” they wrote. “DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”
