The new advisory group promises bold savings and massive spending cuts, but without any expertise in the federal budget, it’s likely to be all bark and no bite.
With great fanfare and stratospheric ambitions, President-elect Donald Trump has unveiled his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump declared DOGE the "Manhattan Project of our time" that will "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies." While such exuberant confidence may be exciting, Trump and his appointed DOGE co-directors Elon Musk—who is also already promising DOGE-related merchandise—and Vivek Ramaswamy are inflating expectations well beyond any plausible outcome.
Despite its name, DOGE will not be an actual government department—or even a White House office. Rather, it will function as a private advisory group with no formal investigative or administrative powers within the federal government. All it can do is research government waste and send a report of policy recommendations to the White House and Congress. And while Trump will have the authority to implement modest administrative reforms unilaterally, any major savings or agency reorganizations will require an act of Congress with bipartisan support to overcome a potential Democratic filibuster.
The question is whether DOGE will make a serious effort to dive into the weeds of administrative waste or just become the ideological vanity project of two billionaires possessing little familiarity with the federal budget and even less time to divert from their more important endeavors. Musk, in particular, is already running Tesla, SpaceX, and X and is thus unlikely to spend much time overseeing an analysis of Medicare payment policies.
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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