Dissecting the DOGE Playbook
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have unveiled their first plans to trim government spending, a blueprint that mirrors how the tech mogul cut costs at Twitter. Layoffs and spending cuts are on Elon Musk’s government agenda.Carlos Barria/ReutersThe Twitter approach to government efficiencyDonald 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More