President-elect Donald Trump named entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with creating a more efficient government, most notably within the bloated federal bureaucracy.
Trump indicated that the DOGE will operate outside the confines of government.
The incoming president said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
In a joint op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Musk and Ramaswamy said that “following the Supreme Court’s guidance,” they will “reverse a decades-long executive power grab”:
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, un-appointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.
Hence “the swamp,” which Trump pledged