Trump is coming for the executive branch. Does he know what he’s doing?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President-elect Donald Trump is coming for the executive branch. Eight years ago, he thought he could shake up federal agencies and left after four years with little to show for it. This time, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the charge, he is talking about even more radical changes. Will he do any better the second time around?
Trump isn’t the first president to try to shrink or reorganize the executive branch, or the first to claim to be leading an assault on waste, fraud and abuse that would deliver significant cost savings and more efficient government. Richard M. Nixon had his Ash Commission. Ronald Reagan had the Grace Commission. Bill Clinton had his National Performance Review, known as “reinventing government,” or “REGO,” led by then-Vice President Al Gore.
Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy have huge ambitions and no humility about what they are undertaking. What they have talked about amounts to a wholesale attack on federal agencies designed to eliminate thousands of regulations, reduce the federal workforce by an order of magnitude that could cripple the delivery of vital services, and effect cost savings that would amount to nearly one-third of the federal budget, or the entire discretionary part of the budget and then some.
All government bureaucracies need occasional overhaul and rejuvenation. Trump’s motivation is more about punishment and retribution. His Cabinet choices point to that. At the Justice Department, as The Washington Post reported, he is prepared to fire the team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith on two indictments of the president-elect. More broadly, he looks to dismantle what he regards as an unresponsive and oppositional administrative state.
Previous attempts to make the government smaller or more efficient have fallen far short of what was promised. Of those earlier efforts, Gore’s reinventing government initiative might have been the most successful. The Grace Commission, named for businessman J. Peter Grace, by contrast, came up with recommendations that promised $424 billion in savings over three years. Closer scrutiny by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office (now renamed the Government Accountability Office) pegged the savings at about $98 billion. Most of what the Grace Commission recommended went nowhere.
Could that be the outcome for Trump in his second term in the White House, roughshod attacks with little to show for it? Experts say what Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about — both in terms of money saved and workforce reductions — is unrealistic and that they will soon bump into political and economic realities that will leave them far short of what they claim. That doesn’t mean, however, that at the outset the president-elect should not be taken seriously about how disruptive he will try to be in his efforts. Musk has claimed he can cut the budget by roughly $2 trillion, but analysts say that would require drastic (and unpopular) cuts in entitlements programs, defense or other vital services.
Trump has created what he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, which is not an official agency of government but simply a unit designed to empower Musk, the world’s richest person, and Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, to begin their work. The two wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that outlined their plan. It is worth a read for anyone wondering about their intentions.
Rhetorically, it is a call to arms “to cut the federal government down to size” and attack “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy [that] represents an existential threat to our republic.” The plan is premised, in part, on recent Supreme Court rulings that limit the power of the agencies to write and impose regulations and that Musk and Ramaswamy say give the president considerable latitude to make big changes.
Musk and Ramaswamy said they will serve as outside volunteers. They will oversee the hiring of “a lean team of small-government crusaders” who will work with “legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these [Supreme Court] rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.” They expect that work to identify vast numbers of regulations that can be eliminated — and that with that will come a reduction in the federal workforce.
The DOGE duo dispute what they say is conventional wisdom that says presidents can’t fire federal workers, that those protections are there to protect workers only “from political retaliation,” but not from broader reductions that don’t target individuals. Further, they say, the president has the power to make other administrative changes, such as the relocation of agencies outside of Washington, which likely would result in many workers choosing to leave government service rather than uprooting. Congress might want a word on anything like that.
The Wall Street Journal opinion piece does not mention cost savings of nearly $2 trillion. Instead, the piece mentions taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in spending “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended.”
Musk and Ramaswamy also said that their initiative would identify “pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.” Whether this is a scaling back of ambitions or an oversight in failing to cite the full scope of the cuts previously described isn’t clear.
Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, who oversaw Gore’s reinventing government initiative, offered counsel to the incoming administration in a piece on the Brookings website entitled, “Cut the government with a scalpel, not an axe.” That was the approach taken during the Clinton administration, which resulted in the elimination of 640,000 pages of internal agency rules and a reduction in the federal workforce of 426,000 employees.
In an interview on Friday, Kamarck applauded the Trump team’s determination to review federal regulations. “A regulatory review is a very sensible and good thing to do and ought to be done periodically anyway,” she said. But she had reservations about some of the other things Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about.
As a candidate for the Republican nomination this year, Ramaswamy claimed the federal workforce could be cut by three-quarters over eight years, with a 50 percent reduction achievable in the first year or two, along with a 40 percent reduction in the number of agencies and units in the executive branch. “I’m probably the candidate in the last 30 years who has the deepest understanding of how to actually shut down the administrative state,” he told Washington Post editors and reporters in June 2023.
Musk has a reputation for cutting budgets or workers at companies he owns, including Tesla, X and Space X. A recent New York Times article said he was often willing “to cut too much rather than too little” and also described him as having spent six hours going line by line through Twitter’s budget with the company’s executives, ordering cuts along the way and brooking no resistance.
Kamarck, however, questioned whether the federal bureaucracy is truly bloated, as Ramaswamy and the Trump team claim. There are, she noted about 19,000 Border Patrol agents. How many of those would Trump cut while still making good on his promise to secure the border and deport millions?
There are about 1,800 air traffic controllers, she said. Would Trump’s team cut that workforce significantly, causing potential flight cancellations and disruption? “It will take about a week and Congress will say, ‘Hey, you can’t do this,’” she said.
And how deeply would he try to cut the workforce at the Social Security Administration, at the risk of checks not being sent out promptly or other breakdowns in a program that he has otherwise vowed not to touch?
Kamarck offered other examples of where the Trump team could produce only symbolic victories. Trump has targeted the Department of Education for elimination. Kamarck said the department could be eliminated but two key programs likely would remain — the student loan program and Title 1, which adds to state and local governments for low-achieving students in areas of higher poverty.
The student loan program could be shifted to the Treasury Department and Title 1 to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said, which means a portion of its budget would be shifted rather than cut. Its workforce is the smallest of any Cabinet agency. Kamarck’s point is that after programs are shifted, the money saved might not be significant and the number of workers eliminated would be tiny.
Kamarck also cautioned the Trump team about its notion that the best approach is to rely primarily on people outside of government to lead the effort, if that is their plan. The Grace Commission did that, using people in the private sector to bring a business sensibility to the federal government. Gore’s operation worked closely with people in the agencies, which Kamarck argued produced better results. “The fat in the government is like the fat in good piece of steak,” she said. “It’s marbled through it.”
Musk and Ramaswamy claimed that with his electoral college majority and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump is poised for “a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.” In the face of expected opposition, they said, “We expect to prevail.”
Those words no doubt reflect the aggressive approach the president-elect and his advisers hope to take once he is sworn in. Meanwhile, executive branch employees are bracing for what could be coming and opponents are preparing to resist through legal and other channels. Whether Trump’s shock troops, led by Musk and Ramaswamy, are truly ready will be known soon.
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He doesn't give a flyin fck about cuttin waste, all he wants to do is take revenge on persons who had good reason to investigate the one man crime wave with two hands tied behind our backs, as he is prepared to make trax, up and down our Armed forcing US Junk, as he gets high watching others squirm unto and before him, and while he needles so many 'libs', he'slobbers all over Putin his mouth golf ballz, fore they seem to get him off, as does the Supreme Court, and the ruled by ignorance as found in the masses os asses who believed he was exaggerating when he told them straight up what he was about, as the 2025 plan sure has come into focus, for those with the blurry vision. For he Knew NOTHING about it two months ago, but boy, it seems to just go and grow, as he recently employed the primary author, as well as numerous co authors, but we're sure just one of those crazy coincidences, or so were told by his supporters so bold
I would hope that you agree there is tremendous waste and inefficiency in the federal government. Hell, in July the federal debt hit $35 trillion and now in November it climbed over $36 trillion. There is definitely a need to reduce government waste and spending.
How far can Trump overhaul the federal government remains to be seen. A lot of any change will require Congress to pass bills and it's doubtful that Congress can really gut the government as a lot of Congress will also be interested in their next election which in part will hinge on how much money they can bring back to their states and districts.
But common sense won't prevent the left-leaning media from crying wolf over everything they can.
There is waste and inefficiency in all bureaucracies, private and public. I know of no serious study of the subject, nothing that indicates that public ones are any worse than private ones. This is an article of faith on the right, a dogma that is simply declared.
Then it is used to make policy. Kinda like some religious dogmas have been used to justify burning people at The stake.
I think any sensible person would want to eliminate waste and inefficiency in government. Everything would work smoother and eventually the national debt would go down. My worry about Trump, and it is completely justified by his history, is that he will use the government to empower himself to do whatever he wants. He has been a crook his entire life and he certainly will not stop now at age 78 and with "immunity" to do whatever he wants.
Everyone saw Trump during the election. He is incredibly duplicitous and mentally erratic. He has assembled a cabinet of yes men and women. Do you want to put the future of the United States government entirely in the hands of someone like that?
Bill O Reilly was on a news show last week. He said the cabinet heads will have no independent authority whatsoever, and every decision they attempt to make will go through Trump. That is why their "ideological" status means very little. Government officials that oppose him or disagree in public with him will be fired the next day.
His first administration was the most corrupt in American history. The second will be worse.
The biggest waste, abuse and fraud in government will occur in the office of the Trump presidency.
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Such detachment from reality. As, even left wing media has conceded, he's assembled the most diverse cabinet in decades. Not in a "everyone shares the same hive mind but has diverse biological features" diversity, but actual intellectual diversity.
He said the cabinet heads will have no independent authority whatsoever,
It's the executive branch and by definition answers to the President. This has been true of every cabinet since the civil war. What's funny is thinking the ciphers who sit in Biden's cabinet are free to disagree with Jill Biden on policy.
d every decision they attempt to make will go through Trump. \
The idea of Trump skipping golf to pore through the minutiae of commerce regulations is pretty funny.
This seems to be your go to comment these days. The people who are actually detached from reality are those who ascribe pure patriotic motives to Trump. It is ALWAYS about what is good for him personally.
[✘] isn't this a bit sweeping... with no justification. And it's coming from someone who probably doesn't spend much time on left-wing media.
But hey! We're on NT, so... whatever...
Do you actually believe the "ideological diversity" of Trumps cabinet will mean anything other than window dressing?
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Yes. It matters a lot. The cabinet members pick the staff who write the regulations that actually govern us. With Congress no longer passing laws, it the regulations issued by the different agencies that matter.
That's reassuring, somehow.
Except politicians and those that are part of the bureaucracy.
What president hasn't...and your proof that president did not have yes men and women?
Large enterprises do not engage in process effectiveness missions with a hatchet. The federal government is enormously complex with all sorts of interrelationships. This can be tackled, but it requires analysis to untangle relationships to enable waste to be snipped. And it will take time. I do not see Musk having the patience for the process done right. More likely, Musk will be recommending hatchet acts that can be seen during Trump's term.
Sounds like mini-Trump, this is just naive arrogance.
Our federal government needs to radically overhauled since it has grown without a plan for as long as I can remember. That means we have all sorts of redundancy, processes that produce deliverables that are never used, and vastly inefficient methods and technologies to effect the processes. Plenty of waste to remove, but this mission is far more complex than just pointing to departments and killing them.
Who thinks Trump actually cares about any of that?
He does not, but he has empowered Musk and Musk will certainly wield his power.
The fascists will subvert law enforcement and the courts. They will tie social services to obedience.
Watch....
Seems more reasonable to worry about such behavior from the people who've already demonstrated it.
Sorry Jack. Can't talk to you. TPTB are watching.
Just who are you referring to? The House Ways and Means Committee? The people at the the IRS? A squirrel?
Didn't read the link?
Can you cite sources? I understand that no bureaucracy is perfectly efficient - nothing is. But I'm unaware of any solid data justifying continual attacks on government. I think that this is another case of "If you repeat it enough, people will believe it."
I spent many years as a management consultant. One golden rule is: "All processes drift. All processes must occasionally be examined to determine the extent of drift, and to determine corrective action." This is true of government and of the private sector.
It is nonsense to assume that a government bureaucracy is inherently less competent than a private bureaucracy. Both need an occasional tune-up.
What an odd response.
You recognize that the Federal government is a bloated bureaucracy but then claim that stating this is bullshit ( "If you repeat it enough, people will believe it.") You then note that process drift occurs in both public and private sectors as if someone has suggested otherwise. Then you literally deem it nonsense the private sector has a better handle on its waste than the public sector. Arguing, it seems, that the public sector is not as messed up as it seems.
Looks to me like talking out of both sides of your mouth.
So you agree the federal government is full of inefficiencies but want a source to back this up because you think the public sector is no worse then the private sector. Well, I guess then you believe the government is efficient enough.
The GAO (the extent department which deals with process effectiveness, etc. in the federal government) provides annual reports offering opportunities for improvement. Typically these are the low-hanging fruit items that improve individual departments, encourage sharing, etc. These are not the large-scale re-engineering initiatives that would accomplish this:
I do not know if there has been any detailed study of the federal government that reveals opportunities for large-scale initiatives Musk expects to undertake. I have assumed no such study exists and have recommended that this is the first step that Musk should take. The best we have are GAO annual reports (e.g. ).
You should know based on your experience that the federal government lacks the profit / competition motive that drives many private sectors to engage in serious process re-engineering initiatives. These initiatives are complex, time-consuming, and costly so there is a need to drive them from the top. With Musk in charge, we have that top-level drive. This could result in a deep study of the federal government to engage in macro efficiencies (rather than micro-efficiencies that have taken place in history). Then with a clear understanding of interrelationships, initiatives are defined and prioritized to transform macro-processes over time (phases) while the federal government continues to operate.
I do not think Musk is interested in such detailed work with very slow to realize results. I expect him to take out his hatchet (not sure he even has a scalpel) and start hacking away. His efforts will be met with plenty of resistance so what will be accomplished in the end is not predictable.
No, I did not use the word "bloated". I specifically asked if you have any data indicating that the Federal bureaucracy is any worse than private bureaucracies.
I did not use the word "bullshit". I said that I think this "Federal bureaucracy is the worst" mantra has no data-based foundation, and asked if you have anything.
Unless you have proof... then it IS nonsense... I thought that you would not advance an opinion without proof.
Looks to me like you're being aggressive for no obvious reason.
No. There is a difference between "has inefficiencies" and "is full of inefficiencies". I repeat: ALL bureaucracies have inefficiencies. I have never seen any credible study showing government inefficiencies to be greater than those found in the private sector.
Indeed... i have no experience that convinces me that greed makes for efficiency. (See what I did there? I exaggerated your words. Now go back and compare what I actually wrote your not-really-quotations of them. Please do not use words that I have not said. Thank you.
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Evidence! Not proof. The evidence should be obvious to anyone trying to work with our government. And for anyone who has dealt with processes in large enterprises, it should be obvious that an enterprise that does not have to deal with profit and competition has far less motivation to clean up its act. Further, politicians have little short-term benefit in pioneering initiatives to improve the government so these are few and far between.
Keep in mind that the context here is the DOGE which seeks to make massive cuts in the federal government. So besides basic common sense, we are operating on the well-founded assumption that there is indeed substantial waste in the federal government.
Cite your evidence.
Then your opinion is based on an absence of evidence. I doubt that such a study has been done because nobody is seriously trying to address the problems. We have worked on low-hanging fruit but have no seriously analyzed the many processes and interrelationships in the federal government in order to take the first step towards process re-engineering. Thus there likely is no 'proof' because nobody has seriously sought to pursue this.
Read your last two comments to me and say that with a straight face.
I'm sad.
No he doesn't, but the rich foreigners he hired do. Tear down America stomping on Americans. I know "maga" voters don't have a clue as to what's coming, but Trump's anger is also directly aimed at them. He is a very vindictive person quite openly, his revenge is also aimed at his voters for not voting in higher numbers in 2020. Trump also secretly blames "maga" voters for failing him. He has slipped and admitted in a few right wing interviews he lost in 2020 when he said something to the effect "can you believe I lost to that guy?" inferring Biden. So when he means "retribution" you better believe it's across the board when it comes Americans regardless of our party line votes. Hitting "maga" hard will come with no pity for them. He couldn't care less if they hurt, he knows if they don't install him as a dictator day one, he can't run again so he doesn't need "maga" anymore.