President-elect Donald Trump announced that billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” despite the fact that government agencies can only be created by an act of Congress.
The new office will be named the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—a reference to a decade-old meme that was later turned into a cryptocurrency beloved by Musk.
Both Ramaswamy and Musk celebrated in posts on X, the social media site Musk purchased for $44 billion in 2022. Ramaswamy said he would withdraw his name from consideration to fill incoming Vice President JD Vance’s senate seat in Ohio, while the Tesla and SpaceX CEO also commented that his new department would have fire “merch.”
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Trump’s announcement of the new role seemed to line up with his previous promises to put Musk in charge of a “commission” to cut government spending. In a statement released on Tuesday night, the president-elect said the pair will “provide advice and guidance from outside the Government, and will partner with the White House Office and Office of Budget & Management to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.”
The president-elect tasked Musk and Ramaswamy with eliminating the “massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending.”
Musk later insisted his agency’s “actions will be posted online for maximum transparency,” and will update a leaderboard for the “most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.”
Only Congress has the power to create federal agencies, although a Republican-controlled Senate and House could theoretically pass a bill establishing the office.
Trump could also appoint the duo under the Federal Advisory Committees Act, which allows the government to set up groups to provide “expert advice, ideas, and diverse opinions to the Federal Government.”
This would potentially allow Musk and Ramaswamy to remain advisers instead of federal employees—meaning they would not necessarily be legally required to disclose conflicts of interest like employees of agencies such as the Department of Justice or the Defense Department.
The president-elect compared the new office to the Manhattan Project—the multinational effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. The project had spent about $2.2 billion–or over $30 billion adjusted for inflation in 2023–by the time the war ended in 1945, according to the Department of Energy.
Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who briefly campaigned against Trump in the Republican primary, made cutting federal spending a central pillar of his campaign. He previously proposed cutting as much as 75 percent of the federal workforce and shuttering multiple federal agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Education.
Ramaswamy suspended his presidential campaign in January after coming in fourth in the Iowa Caucus.
Trump said the duo’s work will end no later than July 4, 2026—the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence.
