Washington is getting ready to run a wild experiment, testing what happens when one of Silicon Valley’s signature “disruptors” meets the world’s biggest bureaucracy. Elon Musk showed up in person in the capital Wednesday morning, the day after Donald Trump named him to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” — an initiative to slash government waste, fraud, and inefficiency, wherever the tech mogul might decide he finds it. Two big unknowns are already looming over the whole idea. One is exactly which parts of government the new office will target. The other is how seriously it will be taken in Washington. Musk will co-lead the project with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor and MAGA cheerleader who ran against Trump in the GOP primary. They’re both outsiders to D.C., and plan to bring a radical outsider’s perspective to the whole idea of government reform. Trump unveiled the idea with his usual lavish promises in a statement from his transition team shared on Truth Social . “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” he wrote, and “will send shockwaves through the system.” Musk’s top-line agenda for the project is already straining credulity in Washington. The mogul, who bandied about the idea with Trump for months after the two men first raised it during a live interview on X, said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in October that he’d take $2 trillion out of the federal budget. It’s not clear if he meant over a decade, or per year — in the latter case, it’s an amount large enough to shutter the entire non-entitlement side of the government, the Pentagon included. Ramaswamy, not to be outdone on the “shockwave” front, has proposed firing federal employees with odd-numbered Social Security numbers. Serious details are scarce so far on what the DOGE plan will actually look like, how it would enforce changes or even how it would even be staffed. (Musk’s companies and Ramaswamy did not respond to a request for comment.) One notable detail, however, is that the “department” isn’t a department at all: it will function more like former President Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission , meant to control federal spending costs, providing “advice and guidance from outside the government” to slash spending and restructure federal agencies. Musk has nevertheless jumped straight into the fray: He spent today escorted by Trump on Capitol Hill, attending the House Republican conference meeting and otherwise familiarizing himself with the government that his $200 million helped elect. It’s unclear yet whether even the most hawkish appropriators have the stomach for Musk’s proposed buzzcut. With promises to use his PAC to pick winners in upcoming Republican primaries, he potentially could have a lot of pull in Congress as a donor, but (very) early returns aren’t yet promising for his influence: The Senate GOP conference elected Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) as majority leader over Musk’s pet candidate, Rick Scott (R-Fla.). Still, Musk will at least forcefully suggest the same ruthless management for the federal government that he’s deployed at X and Tesla (all while reassuring Tesla investors the appointment is only temporary). Given his extensive track record of public statements about his business empire and policy preferences, environmental, labor, and diversity, equity and inclusion spending could be on the chopping block. With Ramaswamy, plans are even less clear. In fact he posted on X that he was looking for ideas, writing that “DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud … and abuse.” Even fans of government efficiency have their doubts about how wise, and how likely, this all is. Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and former President Barack Obama's Deputy Chief Technology Officer, lauded the project’s goal of making a sclerotic federal government more effective and responsive. “If Elon comes to town and wants to do some work to tear down some of the crust that’s been built … I think that’s great, and I wish him luck and would be glad to help,” Pahlka told DFD. She warned, however, that too blunt an approach could end up thwarting a major part of the commission’s goal — enabling a second Trump administration to effectively and efficiently carry out its policies. “If they want to blow [the civil service] up … that’s a very bad idea,” said Pahlka. Proposals are already swirling around the technocratic policy world for what DOGE might accomplish. The Foundation for American Innovation’s Dan Lips, Samuel Hammond and Thomas Hochman published a report in October titled “An Efficiency Agenda for the Executive Branch,” outlining how an incoming administration could eliminate “waste, fraud, and dysfunction” with the help of artificial intelligence tools and work already done by the Government Accountability Office. Pahlka laid out a few straightforward principles for bureaucratic reform, saying “you need to be able to hire and retain the right people, which is going to require civil service reform, reduce their burdens and focus them on outcomes, which requires right-sizing procedures and cleaning up policy and regulatory crust, and to invest in digital and data infrastructure and close the loop between policy and implementation.” Standing in the way of those lofty goals is what such a commission would actually look like, and how much buy-in it can expect from the federal government. When Obama formed the Bowles-Simpson National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to tackle the national debt in the wake of the Great Recession, it featured eminences from the public and private sector, including sitting members of Congress. And crucially, per the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, its meetings and minutes were subject to public scrutiny — none of which is likely congenial to figures like Musk and Ramaswamy, who are more used to going “founder mode” and making sweeping changes with the stroke of a pen (or keyboard). Musk and Ramaswamy could ask for funding for the commission from Congress, most likely with a FACA waiver attached. If denied, they could fund the commission themselves. Even then, however, some who would otherwise be optimistic about a second Trump White House have expressed concern that Musk’s vast business entanglements could create conflicts of interest that would stand in the way of his stated mission to “send shockwaves through the system.” “He bankrolled the president's campaign, and his companies are implicated in all sorts of regulatory regimes. The conflicts of interest are massive and egregious,” Sohrab Ahmari, an author and cofounder of Compact Magazine who recently wrote of a coming “power struggle” between competing power centers in the Trump administration, told DFD. He also argued that Musk should recuse himself from managing X to avoid its appearance as “a government organ.” Niskanen’s Pahlka argued that DOGE might ultimately accomplish its goal more efficiently by getting closer to government, especially given the limited time frame Musk has granted himself to get its work done. “He says he’s only here for six months, and they’re going to lose some of that time, ironically, to the bureaucracy that they’ll need to be able to do anything,” Pahlka said. “I’ve been a part of commissions … where you write these recommendations and then you send them in, so you’re one step removed from the mechanisms of actual change. Or often two or three steps.”
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