NewsElon Musk’s DOGE Is the Problem It Wants to Solve

Elon Musk’s DOGE Is the Problem It Wants to Solve

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and its vague but audacious plans for reforming the executive branch after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two men leading the project, have largely spoken about it only in hazy terms—at least until now. The clarity that they have offered is unlikely to satisfy its critics or doubters, to say the least.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday, Musk and Ramaswamy elaborated in more detail about their plans to “reverse a decadeslong executive power grab” and reshape the federal government. They claimed to have a mandate not only from the American people but also from the Supreme Court in their quest to dismantle federal regulatory agencies. And they advanced legally questionable arguments for how they could accomplish it.

The op-ed opens with a certain lack of self-awareness. “Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government,” the two men wrote. They depicted an America where most policy decisions aren’t made by “the democratically elected president and his political appointees” but by “millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.”

Taking on these nefarious civil servants are two unelected, unappointed men who aspire to wield unaccountable influence—DOGE, despite its name, is not a government agency—who also cannot be fired. “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” they wrote. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.” The irony was apparently lost on them.

To accomplish this, they suggest that they would “identify and hire” a “lean team of small-government crusaders” to be housed within the White House Office of Management and Budget, who would presumably be doing much of the real work. As “outside volunteers,” Musk and Ramaswamy can’t actually cut anything or fire anyone. They would simply make recommendations for others—Trump, Congress, federal agency heads, anyone with actual power—to do it. At the same time, the two men act as if they will take a much more direct, personal role in all of this. Unlike those pesky civil servants, they would do so while carrying a wide range of obvious conflicts of interest and opportunities for corrupt self-enrichment.

Broadly speaking, Musk and Ramaswamy have three stated goals. The first one is to massively reduce the number of federal regulations. They argued that two recent Supreme Court rulings—West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022 and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo earlier this year—compel them toward action. “Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law,” they wrote.

The Supreme Court suggested no such thing. In the West Virginia case,

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