Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy took their government-slashing roadshow to Capitol Hill on Thursday, meeting with lawmakers and brainstorming ideas for tackling so-called federal waste.
The two businessmen, tasked by President-elect Donald Trump with finding new ways to radically gut the federal bureaucracy, reportedly told a group of mostly Republican congressmen that they were compiling “a naughty and nice list” of lawmakers who did and did not embrace their new undertaking. They also listened and took notes as a string of sympathetic lawmakers floated proposals for Musk and Ramaswamy’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” from scrutinizing the Department of Education to ending remote work for federal employees.
“We’re going to see a lot of change around here in Washington,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told ABC, in what may end up being the understatement of the century. DOGE, a nongovernmental advisory group, has promised to develop plans to slash as much as $2 trillion from the national budget by firing workers, cutting programs and rescinding regulations in collaboration with the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Some of the duo’s early antics have already drawn public scrutiny. On Thursday, shortly before their D.C. session, Ramaswamy told CNN that DOGE would look to claw back a $6.6 billion loan that the Department of Energy made to the electric vehicle startup Rivian—a competitor to Tesla, which Musk owns. Musk has also used his new perch to antagonize his rivals, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. After Altman congratulated Trump’s new “A.I. and crypto czar” David Sacks on X Thursday morning, Musk butted in with a laughing-crying emoji, which one X user characterized as “lowkey bullying.” As for Bezos, Musk in November posted that the Amazon founder had encouraged acquaintances to sell off SpaceX and Tesla stock, then emoji-laughed when Bezos denied it.
Musk stands to benefit hugely from his role in the Trump administration, given the billions of dollars of business his companies do with the federal government. That could help explain why the tech billionaire invested a total of nearly $260 billion in Trump’s reelection. New financial disclosures released on Thursday show that Musk not only donated $239 million to his controversial pro-Trump political action committee, America PAC, but that he was also the sole supporter of a secretive group that ran ads likening Trump’s position on abortion to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s. Those misleading ads enraged Ginsberg’s family and served to soften Trump’s anti-abortion views.
Given these entanglements, a number of good government and civic advocacy groups have called on the Trump transition team to put guardrails around Musk and Ramaswamy’s work. In late November, the progressive think tank Public Citizen wrote a letter urging Trump to require that DOGE hold open, recorded meetings and recruit a “fairly balanced” membership. “If the government is going to turn to unelected and politically unaccountable persons to make recommendations as grand as $2 trillion in budget cuts, it must ensure those recommendations come from a balanced and transparent process not rigged to benefit insiders,” the letter read. Thus far, neither DOGE nor the Trump transition team have signaled publicly that such concerns trouble them.
