What Will Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Accomplish with DOGE?

In the weeks since Donald Trump won the election, Republican Washington has been fixated on a topic that is at once familiar (for conservatives) and unexpected (for Trump): the phenomenal sprawl of the federal government and the necessity to do something about it. In the past, Paul Ryan, the anti-Trump Speaker of the House, pressed this line of thinking. Now it comes from two political newcomers: the former Presidential candidate and biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. They have been appointed to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, or doge—a Presidential initiative named for a meme coin—and rein in the administrative state.

If prior generations of Republicans aimed big, Ramaswamy and Musk would aim bigger. Musk set targets of up to at least two trillion dollars in cuts, from a federal budget of roughly seven trillion—the size of which had grown during Trump’s first term, along with the deficit. Ramaswamy, who is more of a natural showman, introduced a “thought experiment” about how such a large excision might be accomplished, beginning with the more than two million federal civilian employees: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. That’s a fifty-per-cent cut right there.”

So far, so Grover Norquist. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the dream of business-oriented Republicans has been that an outsider would storm into town to eliminate the rules and fire the rule-makers. Now, perhaps a little less efficiently, the dream is that two outsiders will do it. The idea is that Musk and Ramaswamy will work in concert with budget-cutters in the executive branch, and with the support of a congressional doge caucus that is already forming. (As agents of government action who apparently won’t actually work for the state, the doge chairs’ arrangement is presumably a bit like Batman’s with the Gotham City P.D.) Musk and Ramaswamy—both fervently attentive to social media and operating seemingly without staff—are directly accessible to like-minded plutocrats in a way that politicians usually are not, and they have been taking suggestions. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, the investor Marc Andreessen claimed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a federal watchdog agency—had been “debanking” conservative entrepreneurs. “The only right answer: shut it down,” Ramaswamy wrote on X. “Delete CFPB,” Musk agreed.

On the Hill, doge has provoked ideological excitement—Mike Johnson, the pro-Trump House Speaker, enthused about a conservative “zeal” for cuts, and Representative Jodey Arrington, the House Budget Committee chair, proposed a work requirement for recipients of Medicaid and other federal welfare programs—but also consternation about the process. A senior Republican aide told Punchbowl News, “Two people who know nothing about how the government works pretending they can cut a trillion dollars, both with decent pulpits to preach from, and the ear of an unpredictable president? Disaster.”

So far, perhaps the most unpredictable thing is that some Democrats apparently see Musk and Ramaswamy’s project as a train to jump on. Representative Jared Moskowitz, a South Florida moderate, became the first Democrat to join the doge caucus, proposing a rearranging of the vast homeland-security apparatus. When Musk expressed some interest in looking at the Defense Department’s gigantic contracts with private defense companies (though presumably not with companies he controls), Senator Bernie Sanders wrote on X, “Elon Musk is right.” Last Thursday, Representative Ro Khanna, the savvy Silicon Valley Democrat and progressive stalwart, posted a general message of support for doge’s waste-cutting mission; he later wrote that it had been viewed twenty-three million times, “the most any post of mine has had in 9 years of Congress.”

There are obvious limits, though, to how much Democrats will embrace a program of enormous budget cuts and deregulation. The Republicans’ limits are less clear. On Thursday, the doge chairs, equipped with a sixty-page plan, attended closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill; Musk bounced one of his many children, a son called X, on his knee. Ramaswamy, for his part, had just smoothly announced at a CNBC summit of corporate executives that hundreds of billions of dollars could be cut from Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare—which together account for nearly half the federal budget—through “basic program-integrity measures.” But protecting the core social-welfare programs has been key to Trump’s rebranding as a different type of Republican, one devoted to the working class. This summer, he embraced labor unions (the Teamsters’ boss, Sean O’Brien, famously spoke at the Republican National Convention), pledged to impose stiff tariffs that he claimed would help protect manufacturing jobs, and inveighed against Big Tech’s ties to China. His running mate, J. D. Vance, praised him as a leader “who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike.”

Yet the Administration now taking shape looks less likely to restrain capitalism than to supercharge it. Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is meant to protect investors from market manipulation and scams, is a cryptocurrency booster. Kevin Hassett, nominated to lead the National Economic Council, is a longtime Washington hand who advised the pro-business Presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and Musk ally, has been tapped for a free-floating role overseeing A.I. and crypto. For Treasury Secretary, Trump has chosen Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund manager and George Soros protégé, whose main task seems to be to try to reassure Wall Street.

Part of the dissonance of this transition period is that pundits are still mulling exactly how Trump made his historic gains among traditionally Democratic working-class voters, even as he hands the initiative for his economic program to Musk, a China-friendly industrialist, who spent some two hundred and fifty million dollars on Trump’s campaign, and who now stands to become even more powerful. The tech titans have supplied a futurist sheen to a Trumpist project that had only really been able to focus on the past. Yet there’s a familiar ring here: Republicans are back in power; deregulation and spending cuts to social programs meant to protect ordinary people are back in vogue. The Trump Republicans are beginning to seem less like a populist party—and this moment, perhaps, less like a populist time—than they had led their followers to believe. ♦