President-elect Donald Trump has wasted no time since election day, having already announced a string of cabinet appointments—including Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Elise Stefanik as United Nations ambassador, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.
But if there is one appointment that will really shake things up in Washington, D.C., it’s Elon Musk as a government efficiency advisor, alongside fellow billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
In a press release, the Trump campaign referred to the newly minted posts as part of the “Department of Government Efficiency” or D.O.G.E., in a nod to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin that went viral after Musk (among others) promoted it on social media.
Campaigning as a Trump surrogate in the months prior to the election, Elon Musk made the case that the federal bureaucracy is bloated to the breaking point. The data he used to make his case are alarming:
- The United States is almost $36 trillion in debt, representing a debt to GDP ratio of 123 percent.
- America’s debt servicing costs now exceed both military spending and the Medicare budget.
- There are some 430 federal agencies in existence today (with the federal government itself unsure of the exact number), meaning that almost two new agencies have been created every year since America’s founding.
There are already signs that the Department of Education and National Public Radio would be among the first agencies and programs to go under the microscope.
Following Trump’s announcement of the appointment, Musk sketched out the creative approach he would be taking to get America’s finances back in the black.
“All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency,” he wrote on X, adding:
“Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!
We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.”
Other X users provided just a sample of such “entertaining” reports of waste—including millions spent on transgender monkey research, $6 million to promote tourism in Egypt, a $2.7 million grant to study Russian cats walking on a treadmill, soap dispensers purchased for military aircraft at over 80 times the commercial price, and hundreds of billions in funding that went to expired programs.
Social media has been abuzz since the announcement. Many observers have commented that a brilliant engineering mind like Musk’s is precisely what’s needed to fix a problem that previous leaders have ignored—including even Trump during his first term.
As the CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, and new owner of X (formerly Twitter), Musk has a reputation for solving old problems in new ways and for prizing efficiency, performance, and innovation above all. As just one example, he infamously fired 80 percent of Twitter’s staff in the first six months following acquisition, which has not stopped X from continuing to break its own usage records.
Are there any concerns about Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk as government efficiency advisor?
Despite Musk’s use of the D.O.G.E. moniker, he will not be heading up a new federal agency. Rather, as President-elect Trump clarified in his announcement, Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside government to provide the White House with “advice and guidance.” And while Trump warned that they were recruited to “drive large scale structural reform” and noted that their work would likely shock government systems, any proposals they make would still be subject to the Office of Management and Budget.
Some critics have asked whether Musk has sought the role for his own financial benefit, though they have not provided any evidence of such a claim. Others argue that Musk has regularly run afoul of government regulations, making him unqualified for such a role—though they failed to mention the possible political agenda behind the spate of lawfare being endured by Musk.
Either way, what have we got to lose?
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Image credit: public domain (Trump); public domain (Musk)
