Blitz Bureau
WASHINGTON: President-elect Donald Trump named tech billionaire Elon Musk and conservative activist Vivek Ramaswamy to head a new Department of Government Efficiency, NBC News reported.
In a statement on social media on November 13, Trump said, the department will help “dismantle Government Bureaucracy” and slash excess regulations. The name of the agency, DOGE for short, is a reference to a meme and a cryptocurrency associated with Musk, the NBC News report said further.
Trump said he wanted the department to help deliver “drastic change,” and he compared its ambitions to those of the World War II project to develop atomic weapons. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”
He gave a deadline of July 4, 2026, for the department to conclude its work. In a statement released by the transition team, Musk said, “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” On X, he added: “Threat to democracy? Nope, threat to BUREAUCRACY!!!” Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which is more than the discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion. He has provided few details about what he’d like to cut.
Ramaswamy has called for mass layoffs at federal agencies, a tactic that could sidestep legal protections that otherwise insulate the federal civil service from targeted political cuts. He said on X with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “If you simply mandated federal employees to work Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., like most Americans, you’d see a mass exodus – probably a 25% thinning of the bureaucracy right there.”
Ramaswamy campaigned for President in the Republican primaries on eliminating federal agencies, and his initial targets included the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Education Department; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and the Food and Nutrition Service within the Agriculture Department. The Government Accountability Office, the main federal government watchdog, indicated it would provide any necessary information to Trump’s new entity.
