Trump picks Musk, Ramaswamy to run new dept of govt efficiency

Washington: Donald Trump has asked Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is also his campaign donor and adviser, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Indian-origin Republican presidential aspirant turned supporter, to offer advice on how to slash and restructure the US federal government.
In a statement on Tuesday evening eastern time (Wednesday morning IST), Trump said that the “great” Musk, “working in conjunction” with the “American patriot” Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“Together these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditure, and restructure federal agencies,” Trump said, terming it the Manhattan Project of these times. He said the department will wrap up its work by 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.”
Trump said that DOGE will “provide advice and guidance from outside the government” but it will work closely with White House and the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before”.
Ironically, the name of the cryptocurrency that Musk has championed since for several years now is also Doge, short for Dogecoin, named as a joke when it was set up in 2013.
Ramaswamy is a Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer turned entrepreneur who shot into national prominence during the Republican presidential primaries in 2023. Positioning himself as an “America First” candidate, Musk withdrew after coming fourth in the Iowa primary in January this year and threw his weight behind Trump.
A university classmate of Vice President elect JD Vance and his wife Usha, Ramaswamy was a top media surrogate for Trump during the campaign, drew praise from President-elect for his eloquence, and laid out his intellectual position as one of national libertarianism. 
While the status of the body outside the government instantly diminishes its authority and makes it merely an advisory formation, the political proximity of both the men, especially Musk, to the President-elect is expected to give DOGE more power than many official bodies. The outside status of the department also appears to be driven by Musk’s many business roles that he may have to had to shed if DOGE was an official entity.
Many past Republican administrations have hoped to reduce the size of government. But Trump’s announcement represents the most significant win so far for libertarians in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. This segment of Trump’s supporters view America’s problems as stemming from its federal bureaucracy and regulatory agencies, and have long aimed to downsize parts of the government and totally dismantle other parts of it with the stated aim of enhancing liberty, improving efficiency and unleashing entrepreneurship and innovation.
Critics see this approach as a cover for a laissez-faire model that removes regulatory guardrails and allows reckless capitalism, reduces state capacity and funding for welfare, ignores the climate crisis, and weakens individual rights by empowering the already dominant actors. Having Musk, whose businesses have to meet regulatory standards and government approvals, be in charge of dismantling precisely these regulatory bodies has also generated apprehensions about conflict of interest.
The announcement comes after Trump has made a flurry of personnel appointments in recent days, kicking off his transition at a far more rapid pace than in 2016. He has named his campaign manager and veteran Florida operative, Susan Wiles, as chief of staff. Trump has also picked Mike Waltz, a Florida Congressman, a China hawk and co-chair of the House India caucus as his national security advisor; Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hawk, as his deputy chief of staff for policy; Tom Homan, another hardliner on immigration, as his border czar; and Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, to serve as his secretary for homeland security.
While media reports have suggested that Trump is likely to pick Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, as his Secretary of State, the President-elect hasn’t made a formal announcement yet. On Tuesday, Trump also picked Pete Hegseth, an army veteran and Fox News host, as secretary for defense.
Trump said that he looked forward to Musk and Ramaswamy making changes to the federal bureaucracy with an eye on improving efficiency and improving the lives of Americans. “Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 trillion of government spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy and make the U.S. government accountable.” Trump has promised to reduce the deficit and scale back the national debt, a tall order given his other promises of reducing taxes and maintaining welfare. The task then of reducing government expenditure is crucial to his fiscal goal but will require trade-offs.
After the announcement, Musk, who gave more than $130 million to the Trump campaign during the elections, reiterated a campaign claim that instead of 428 federal agencies, 99 were just enough. He had said during the campaign that US had more agencies than the number of years it had been in existence, many had overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities, regulatory agencies kept adding regulations and this made almost everything illegal to do. Musk’s own animosity against regulations is reported to have been driven by the delays and red he has encountered for SpaceX launches.
“All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency. Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know! We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining,” Musk posted on X.
After the announcement, Ramaswamy withdrew himself from consideration to fill JD Vance’s Senate seat from Ohio, the home state they share, and said, “Over the last 2 years, the Supreme Court has ruled that the administrative state is behaving in wildly unlawful ways. But slapping the bureaucracy on the wrist won’t solve the problem, the only right answer is a massive downsizing.” He added, “DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, & and abuse. Americans voted for drastic government reform & they deserve to be part of fixing it.”