Dissecting the DOGE Playbook

The Twitter approach to government efficiency

Donald Trump picked Elon Musk and the financier Vivek Ramaswamy to tackle one of his administration’s biggest priorities — reducing the size of the federal government.

The two have now shed some light on what Trump has called the Department of Government Efficiency plans to do. They appear to be taking a page from Musk’s playbook for extreme cost-cutting.

“We won’t just write reports or cut ribbons,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, addressing skepticism that their initiative, known as DOGE, can achieve. “We’ll cut costs.”

How they plan to do it: Musk and Ramaswamy said they would focus on razing agency regulations, laying off government employees and cutting costs, including appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood. (That said, Congress created the public broadcasting organization and authorizes its budget.)

They’ll lean heavily on two recent Supreme Court rulings, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which together sharply curtailed agencies’ ability to act. “These cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law,” Musk and Ramaswamy write.

DOGE will present a lengthy list of regulations to gut to Trump, who they say would then be free to use executive action to halt their enforcement and then move to rescind them.