Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have begun to set the framework for President-elect Donald Trump's newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The DOGE leaders, who will act as cost-cutters for the federal government, officially started their recruitment process for the department on Thursday.
The X account for the department recently went live for the sake of full transparency, according to Musk.
“Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know! We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.”
Musk and Ramaswamy are tasked with large-scale structural reform, focusing on dismantling government bureaucracy, slashing excess regulations, and restructuring federal agencies. They have been tasked with weeding out massive waste and fraud in the annual $6.5 trillion of government spending, according to Trump.
Ann Skeet, director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center, says that Musk's businesses may pose a potential conflict of interest issue for him and his new role.
For example, his SpaceX company has billions of dollars in contracts with NASA. Tesla, his other company, benefits from government tax incentives and is subject to auto safety regulations.
As for Ramaswamy, getting involved in DOGE appears to align with past comments he has made on the campaign trail in which he expressed support for federal layoffs. He called to slash 75 percent of the federal workforce during his first term if elected to office.
While the development of the department is still in its early stages, Trump's move to create DOGE can be compared to President Ronald Reagan's development of a cost-cutting commission in 1982. Similarly, Reagan also tapped a business tycoon to lead the agency.