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Agents representing Donald Trumpthe newly formed “Department for Government Efficiency” (DOGE) – a non-governmental agency led by a duo of tech billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – tasked with reducing excess federal spending – have already gone to work, even before the inauguration of the new president.
Surrogates for DOGE, which is still very much a work in progress, have already visited 12 federal agencies for preliminary interviews with employees about running those jobs. The Washington Post reports.
The Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services are among the bureaus that have already answered the agents’ doors and answered their questions, according to the release. Post.
The development comes shortly after Musk, the world’s richest man, started take back his boast that DOGE will be able to find $2 trillion in savings as part of his mission to curb red tape and waste in Washington DC – which appears to be based on proposing drastic cuts and mass layoffsas happened in Twitter after Musk bought the social network in 2022 and rebranded it as X.
Participating in a remote interview with Stagwell CEO Mark Penn as part of the CES show in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Wednesday, Musk was asked, “Do you think $2 trillion is a realistic number now that you’re looking more closely?”
“I think we’re going to try for $2 trillion. I think that is the best outcome,” he replied.
“But I think you have to have a little extra in a way. I think if we try for $2 trillion, we have a good chance of getting $1 [trillion].”
Much is currently unknown about exactly how his department will operate, whose role is ostensibly advisory and limited to making recommendations to the White House Office of Management and Budget to act as it sees fit.
There also appears to be a good chance that DOGE will face many obstacles as it goes about its business, from both congressional Republicans being reluctant to wave large budget cuts that could affect their constituencies and civil servants who don’t fit the culture “disruptors” in Silicon Valley. unleashed on the slow-moving and necessarily convoluted machinery of Washington.
It’s also currently unclear what powers the new body currently has, how it fits into the Trump transition team’s broader briefing schedule with staff from the agencies it will take over, and who, at this stage, is paying the agents’ salaries.
Overall, it’s not clear how DOGE hopes to initiate change, with the next fiscal year for the U.S. government not starting until Oct. 1 and spending for the current year being thrown around on Capitol Hill under the leadership of the House Speaker. Mike Johnson.
Musk tried incite a rebellion against Johnson last month over a stop-gap spending bill he took exception to, only for Johnson to break it up into separate bills and pass many of the provisions he opposed anyway, and the president was subsequently re-elected to another term last week.
The Department of Defense was one agency the GOP overwhelmingly voted to increase spending in light of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza — it’s also a bureau that billionaires have singled out for downsizing.
What is known is that DOGE currently has about 50 employees at Musk’s SpaceX office in downtown DC and that hiring continues apace, and insiders are talking Post that the goal is to double the number of employees by Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Musk’s agency has already made executive appointments, adding Boring Company chairman Steve Davis and former Uber CEO Emil Michael to oversee its project, and the president-elect has also tapped political insiders Katie Miller and Bill McGinley to help.
In advertising the positions, DOGE invited applications from “super high IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting” and reportedly used the encrypted messaging app Signal to orchestrate its efforts.
Just after Christmas, it announced it was looking for IT, HR and finance staff in permanent, salaried roles and has since put out a call for full-time software and information security engineers to join its ranks.