Musk, Ramaswamy vow ‘mass head-count reductions’ in U.S. government

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy vowed “mass headcount reductions” to the federal government in an opinion piece Wednesday that sketched out their vision for President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” in the greatest detail so far.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy laid out their plans to slash federal regulations, cut government spending and significantly reduce the number of federal employees. Trump tapped the two with running the “DOGE” initiative last week, but basic questions about the effort — including its goals, operations and authorities — have primarily remained a source of speculation.

While their essay left much unclear, tech entrepreneur Musk and Ramaswamy — a billionaire executive and a former 2024 GOP presidential rival of Trump’s — began to articulate the legal and procedural steps by which they plan to transform federal operations.

The DOGE commission, they wrote, will first “work with legal experts embedded in government agencies” and “advanced technology” to identify regulations that Trump can repeal.

Musk and Ramaswamy argued that recent cases decided by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will enable major reductions in federal regulations. After Trump “nullifies thousands of such regulations,” the DOGE will then work with “embedded appointees” across federal agencies to “identify the minimum number of employees” required for an agency to perform its minimum functions.

The DOGE leaders suggested that Trump can unilaterally slash the number of federal employees because many of them will no longer be necessary once the regulations are eliminated.

Musk and Ramaswamy did not specify the number of federal employees they envision being cut under their effort. They wrote that “existing laws” can give federal employees “incentives for early retirement” and voluntary severance payments to “facilitate a graceful exit.”

These proposals could affect not just scores of federal operations but also the Washington area, which is home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

To reduce federal spending, Musk and Ramaswamy also proposed eliminating programs that Congress funds but where specific spending authorization has lapsed.

In the op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy said “large-scale audits” during “temporary suspension of payments” could yield savings, although they didn’t articulate what that would entail.

The op-ed embraces a dramatic change in the balance of power over spending. Trump’s aides have planned to challenge a 1974 budget law that limits the president’s ability to cease spending on federal programs without congressional approval. If the Supreme Court agrees, the White House would dramatically expand its ability to cut programs unilaterally.

They also suggested a reprisal of an effort that petered out at the end of Trump’s first term.

In the waning weeks of Trump’s first administration, the White House moved forward a controversial policy that would have allowed the president to fire tens of thousands of government employees.

Trump officials focused the effort on mid-and high-ranking professionals in policymaking roles whom they said were impossible to fire, protected by long-standing civil service rules. Each agency would identify career employees to shift into a new job category known as Schedule F.

Implementation of the new policy, mandated by an executive order the White House issued less than two weeks before Election Day in 2020, accelerated at the White House budget office. OMB officials sent a list of roles identified by Russell Vought's staff to the federal personnel agency for final sign-off. Vought was the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The list comprised 88 percent of the workforce, 425 analysts and other experts who would shift into Schedule F. President Joe Biden killed the executive order on his first day in office.

Trump vowed during his campaign to reinstate Schedule F it he took back the White House, and Vought seems positioned to overturn the rule and lead the charge once more. The Musk and Ramaswamy op-ed did not mention Schedule F by name, though the intent appears largely similar.

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