Musk, Ramaswamy outline ‘drastic’ cuts as US gov’t efficiency tsars

Trump allies say they will ‘liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress’.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, United States President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming “efficiency” tsars, have outlined plans for a “drastic reduction” in regulations and “mass head-count reductions”.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Musk and Ramaswamy said they would rely on two recent Supreme Court rulings that limited the authority of federal regulatory agencies to “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress”.

Musk and Ramaswamy said they would work with legal experts within government agencies and use advanced technology to identify regulations that Trump could “immediately pause the enforcement of” and subject to “review and rescission”.

“When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.

“In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorised by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies.”

Musk and Ramaswamy, who have been tapped by Trump to lead a so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said they would target more than $500bn “authorised by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended”, including $535m in funding for public broadcasting, $1.5bn in grants to international organisations and nearly $300m given to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

Musk and Ramaswamy said DOGE would also carry out audits of government contracts to “yield significant savings” and “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions”.

“Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink,” they wrote, referring to the healthcare programmes covering more than 150 million Americans.

“But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end – and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.”

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has emerged as one of Trump’s most powerful and influential allies since publicly endorsing the president-elect earlier this year.

The South African-born billionaire poured millions of dollars into Trump’s re-election campaign and has sat in on many of the president-elect’s meetings and calls with lawmakers and foreign leaders.