I have a better idea. Instead of any kind of new department we just take a match to what we have now?
Anyway, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will head the Department of Government Efficiency.
Yes, it will be known as DOGE. If you guys don’t know the significance of its name, I encourage you to read about Dogecoin.
Trump insists DOGE’s work will end “no later than July 4, 2026.”
I’ll believe it when I see it. When’s the last time government established something and it went away?
Trump said:
It will become, potentially, “The Manhattan Project” of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of “DOGE” for a very long time. To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.
I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans. Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to “WE THE PEOPLE.” Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026 – A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!
🚨STATEMENT FROM PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
Let’s go, @elonmusk @VivekGRamaswamy! pic.twitter.com/YKT1V1UBVR
— Karoline Leavitt (@kleavittnh) November 13, 2024
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Comments
Well, without an Act of Congress I don’t see it becoming a full-metal Cabinet department with a Senate-confirmed Secretary.
I thought Elon would be appointed Director of the Office of Government Efficiency, making him the DOGE.
No act of congress is required. While Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 says that congress MAY create departments in its discretion, nothing in the language suggest that ONLY congress can do so or that an act of congress is necessary precondtion for the Artle II head to do so.
They’ll need to appropriate money to operate it.
You’re reading the Constitution as a liberal might. There is ZERO enumerated authority in the USC for the president to unilaterally create Cabinet-level departments. Can you name a single Cabinet agency created without establishing legislation passed by Congress? No, you can’t. Article II says quite clearly: ‘with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
This is the reason Jack Smith ‘appointment’ as Special Counsel is certainly constitutionally infirm. There is no legislation that ceded to the president an ability to appoint his own prosecutors without advice and consent of Congress. If presidents can’t appoint special counsels without Congressional advice and consent – and they clearly can’t – they certainly can’t appoint Cabinet Secretaries.
The Heritage Foundation (in an article authored by Paul Larkin) spells it out below…
https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-presidents-reorganization-authority
Incorrect.
Musk does not have time to do this full time and Ramaswamy also fits perfectly into the role of CEO.
Trump is shaking things up. He was not kidding when he said that things will change fast. The sad thing is that progressives will try to obstruct no matter what. The reckoning of their abuses approaches and who knows what they will do hide from the sunlight.
This is great in principle. Musk fired most of Twitter’s employees and made it a better company. You could probably take 20% out of the cost of operating government without affecting performance at all. But to how many employees can you just say “You’re fired” and they actually will go away?
For all practical purposes, none of them. Unlike many employees in private companies operating in most states, federal government employees are largely NOT categorized as “at will.’ There are some employees in the Executive Branch that ‘serve at the pleasure of the president’ (like political appointees, for instance and some military officers). But, this is a fraction of a fraction of the total work force. For everyone else, there is some varying layer of employment protection. Some of these protections are statutory, regulatory or protections negotiated through collective bargaining agreements. Average Americans (those without experience working for the government themselves) have little idea how incredibly difficult it is to get fired from the US federal government.
A recent SCOTUS decision ruled, effectively (and correctly), that the POTUS is the executive branch. There may be rules regarding employment that won’t permit him to fire people (these could be challenged now as a legislative intrusion on the authority of the POTUS/executive branch). But POTUS can probably eliminate, at will, offices and positions within agencies. The difference may be subtle, and those who lose their positions may be laterally transfered to other positions (knocking less senior employees out of their positions), but the net effect will be a RIF.
I know how this works because this is exactly what happened to me (I’m a state worker). My position was eliminated. Normally, I would have been able to bump a less senior employee, but the agency was intent on getting rid of me, personally, so it ruled there were no suitable jobs into which I could be laterally transferred. The law and union rules did not protect me. Even if I had bumped someone, somewhere down the line an employee would have been let go.
I would not be surprised if something like this can be done at the federal level. The law may say a worker can’t be fired, but positions can probably be eliminated, as there is no guarantee of actually having a job.
Yep. Eliminating regulations and the scope of agency power to align with recent SCOTUS rulings which gutted Chevron doctrine among other limits on agency power/reach. Do that and you obviously need less bureaucrats so you have a reduction in force.
I suspect that simply making these folks show up to the office v continuing remote work along with some other changes will go a fair way towards many choosing to resign. Add in relocation from DC area to the hinterlands and more will depart. Then bring in the two Bobs ‘want would you say you do here?’
Also the two Bobs would just recommend not to fire them, just stop paying them, and the problem solves itself.
What you’re describing is called ‘Presidential Reorganization Authority.’ It’s a grant of authority by Congress to the President. These are finite in length and have only been issued by Congress a handful of times in the last 100-years, most ‘recently’ 40-years ago (Reagan). Absent that grant of authority, it’s more difficult for presidents to rearrange the Executive Branch deckchairs outside in the core Executive Branch positions (people who work in the president’s White House). If Congress creates something by statute, only a subsequent statute enacted by Congress can ‘uncreate’ that something.
I wish this weren’t the case. But, it clearly is. And, it’s been very well litigated. Most Republican presidents the last 100-years have come into office looking to ‘cut the fat.’ and every single one of them has had limited success, at best. Why? Because the Courts have held that Congress and Congress alone has the Constitutional authority to create Departments and Agencies (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2:). The most famous (and recent) example of GOP presidents wanting to get rid of an agency is the Interstate Commerce Commission. Nixon, Ford & Reagan all wanted it gone and all tried and failed. It wasn’t until the mid 1990s, when the GOP finally won control of the House in a generation, was that desire finally sated. The ICC was removed by statute signed into law by Clinton.
The firing element is more rooted in contemporary federal employment law. As I mention above, most of the protections of federal workers are based on statutory law and/or collective bargaining agreements, two things the Executive may not unilaterally change.
With respect to your personal circumstance, It may work differently in your state. It would depend entirely on how your state constitution is structured. Perhaps your state Executive has broader power to arrange state agencies than POTUS does.
There are significant statutory protections for federal employees. There’s an entire agency dedicated to the protection of federal employee due process, the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). For much of the 20th Century, Federal Courts expanded the protections of federal workers through judicial decisions. Then, in the 1960s, Congress enacted a series of laws to codify these protections. Wanting to give the Executive Branch some ability to terminate poor-performing/misbehaving federal employees, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA). There are some agencies, like the FAA, that are statutorily exempted from the MSPB and CSRA, for the rest of them, the protection of those laws and others, make it effectively impossible for the president and his appointees to fire large swaths of people because even for those who are ‘RIFd,’ there are statutory procedures in place for people to keep their jobs.
Reagan tried to do exactly what is being proposed. While he had some limited success very early in his tenure, by the time he left office there were 2-million more civilian employees in the federal workforce than there were when he entered office mostly because the Democrat-controlled Congress generated this growth with the budgets they sent to Reagan’s desk.
“how incredibly difficult it is to get fired from the US federal government.”
The point to to change that, government is incredibly bloated. Even worse is it is full of lazy, incompetents,
I’ve just been listening to Musk’s autobiography.
He should buy Boeing.
But if he cleans house at the dept of Useless as tits on bulls, then good for him, good for us. Bring some chlorine to the swamp.
Boeing’s market cap is $100B+. A takeover bid would have to be materially improve upon that number (usually a premium of 135% of stock price, sometimes much more) to obtain shareholder approval. Musk is rich…but not that rich…yet. His net worth jumped $70B this week.
I dont see how Musk gets past the conflict of interest**. He owns Twitter, Tesla, and most importantly SpaceX (which has huge government contracts). He cant (for example) be involved in the cancellation of NASA’s SLS (because that would benefit SpaceX). I think SLS is a massive waste and SpaceX is cheaper, but his involvement will only bring lawsuits.
** He could resign and put his assets in a trust. I cant see this.
He’s not a government employee. It’s more like a company hiring outside efficiency consultants.
I wondered about this myself. He would at minimum need to recuse himself for decisions that could result in benefits to his company. Italso brings into question whether Musk can have a non- governmental Twitter account as Presidennt Trumps was considered public and thus could not block any posters.
That said….I would love Musk to pull a Twitter on the federal bureaucracy. Decimating the liberal Brahman regulatory class would be a benefit to the world.
On the other hand I would lo
Musk and Ramaswamy riding roughshod over our tormentors?
Oh, hells yes.
Frankenstein loosed.
https://youtu.be/P8f-Qb-bwlU?si=Ri99kfqjoTrRsXL-
Musk and Ramaswamy need to go after the Department of Energy (DOE). I was in the DOE complex of contractors for a very long time. It’s filled with incompetents. A little history. First there was the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) with excellent scientists in charge. Then the AEC fissioned into the NRC (reactors) and ERDA (Energy Research and Development Administration) which then combined with Federal Energy Management Administration to create the monster DOE. All this change under Carter. The entire thing is a joke. Get rid of it except for the NNSA which oversees nuclear weapons. Keep that but make sure it has first class people. Who know some physics. Go to the Forrestal Building with a flame thrower and a wrecking crew. I know from first hand experience how dumb some of the people at DOE are. I would not trust them to mail a letter which would strain their capabilities. I have a ton of stories. Kill it and save the taxpayers a lot of money.
Yes and Hell yes. I say we give them new sharpening stones to make sure that the blade they’re using is razor sharp
I disagree. A dull spoon should be used, because it would hurt more…
I like the sound of it but expect a bi partisan war against any reductions. Everyone likes the sound of “Mr. Chairman’, even Republicans.
Trump could start by eliminating any funding to NGO’s that are breaking the law by helping illegal immigration. Let Congress appropriate the money for it if they want it so bad. The Dems just lost an election partially on that issue and most of the public have no idea how much of their tax dollars are going to these groups.
Trump has just put Musk and Ramaswamy in charge of the project with the most potential benefits and long-term consequences. Our government is bloated beyond belief, which impacts the cost of the government, the efficiency of the government, and the evil potential of the government. This is also the hardest “easy” problem to solve, but Trump has a unique opening in American history to handle it.
I am very, very optimistic about this effort and I think Musk and Ramaswamy are perfect for the task. We’ll see. I think this could be yuge!!!
Of course, because everybody knows that the best way to get rid of bureaucracies is to create another one.
It’s time limited 7/4/26
“When’s the last time government established something and it went away?”
1973. The Draft.
Though like smallpox, it could always come back.
It appears DOGE is not a new govt agency. The announcement says DOGE will “provide advice and guidance from outside Government…” and work with the WH and OMB to implement. So he’s setting them up as outside consultants. Potentially a brilliant solution to multiple issues, and I doubt either Elon or Vivek wants to become a government employee, and they likely can’t afford the pay cut.
Despite the name, this is obviously not going to be an actual department of government. If it were then they’d need nomination and senate confirmation. Also Trump said explicitly that they’d be offering advice and guidance from outside government, rather than doing anything themselves.
So there’s no new bureaucracy either. They’ll presumably have a budget and employees, but once their final report is in they all go home, and their recommendations are either adopted or rejected.
So what you’re describing is a system under which these two guys have no actual power. Instead, they write up a Mueller Report, or a Contract With America, and leave it up to somebody else to implement, which no one will.
Presumably they’ll deliver their report directly to Trump, who will consider it and decide what actions he ought to take.
The first thing they should do is recommend the elimination of every government activity not specifically authorized or required by the Constitution. That will clear up 90% of the problems right there.
I have a suggestion to cut govt spending; get rid of TSA. Those screening positions should be funded by increased fees on air travelers. Keep the Air Marshal program. Have some limited federal funding for airport security to supplement local govt but no more than 5% of security force/costs.
M & V are merely going to be the idea and analysis guys. The responsibility for trimming the fat will rest with the Cabinet members. Thus getting the right people into the Cabinet posts will be the key.
Correct. If there are not 50 votes to confirm someone like Matt Gaetz or Pete Hegseth (there should be but. . . .) will John Thune declare the Senate in recess so that Trump canmake them recess appointments? I doubt it. Rick Scott would have.