Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to have a really tough time trying to achieve their Donald Trump-given mission of making the government more efficient, says CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
The president-elect announced on Tuesday that Musk and Ramaswamy would head up a “Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’)” which would help his new administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
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Trump likened their task to a modern version of the World War II-era Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb, but left key questions about the supposed department unanswered—including the form it would take, given that the department currently doesn’t exist and new departments can’t be formed without an act of Congress.
He also didn’t explain why a department focused on government efficiency requires two leaders.
On Tuesday night’s AC360, Toobin said the new “department” would most likely be “part of the White House staff,” noting that a U.S. president can hire whoever they want, but that wouldn’t make it a government department.
“However, there is a very boring and very important law called the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how the government moves along in terms of changing how it works,” Toobin said. “And it requires a lot of hoops to be jumped through if you want to get rid of part of a government department. If you want to change the structure of the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior. You have to go through all these steps.”
“Like it or not, these two entrepreneurs are going to have to start learning that and following it,” Toobin continued, referring to Musk and Ramaswamy. “And it’s going to drive them crazy. And we’ll see how much they actually do. There have been lots of attempts to make the government more efficient. Al Gore did it. There was something called the Grace Report back in the Reagan administration. It’s a lot harder than it seems.”
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