Where will Musk and Ramaswamy's new Department of Government Efficiency make cuts?

WASHINGTON (TNND) — Donald Trump wants to make the government leaner and more efficient, handing the task to Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The two will co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency or "DOGE" for short.

I don’t know if you’ve met Elon yet but he doesn’t bring a chisel, he brings a chainsaw to that bureaucracy and it’s going to be a lot of fun," said Ramaswamy at the gala held at Mar-a-Lago Thursday evening.

The federal budget totaled $6.75 trillion for fiscal year 2024. Musk wants to slash that by two trillion.

In 2024, the highest spending buckets were Social Security, at $1.46 trillion, health, at $912 billion, and Medicare, at $874 billion. Musk hasn’t given specific plans but says everyone would be "getting a haircut."

VOTE | Do you support Trump's proposal to create a Department of Government Efficiency?

Ramaswamy, on the other hand, has called for eliminating 75% of the federal workforce, which amounts to 2.3 million civilian employees. He’s also called for getting rid of the Department of Education and the FBI.

"This is so needed because everyone knows there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste in our government," said Steve Moore, an economist at the Heritage Foundation who served as an economic advisor the the Trump Campaign. "The real challenge will be for Donald Trump to get his people who are running these agencies to actually go in and make the cuts and get Congress to make the cuts as well."

Musk and Ramaswamy will not have the power to make direct spending cuts or regulatory changes. Instead, they will make recommendations to the White House for the president’s annual budget, something Congress is not required to follow. These recommendations will be made by July 4, 2026.

Musk and Ramaswamy announced they’ve started hiring for DOGE. They want a team of super-high IQ revolutionaries willing to work 80-plus hours a week. A catch is these will reportedly not be paid positions.