Tech billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are traveling to Capitol Hill on Thursday present their ideas for President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The new group is expected to recommend drastic cuts to federal staffing and slashing regulation. However, to achieve these goals, the group must work together through Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson posted on Musk’s social media platform

In social media posts, podcasts, editorials, books and speeches, Musk and Ramaswamy have laid out what they plan to do: a 75 percent reduction in federal staff, a $2 trillion cut in federal spending and the abolition of entire agencies such as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Despite these important proposals, there are significant hurdles to significantly reducing overall spending.

Only 16 percent of the $6.1 trillion in government spending in 2023 went to funding non-defense “discretionary” programs like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And cuts to defense spending, popular with lawmakers of all stripes and a boon for Musk’s company, are unlikely to find favor.

Nearly three-quarters of all federal spending in 2023 was so-called “mandatory spending,” which funded programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The number of federal employees has remained roughly the same since the late 1960s.

Growing support from the Hill

While the full details of these policy proposals remain unclear, a growing number of lawmakers have signaled early support for the effort.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, recently launched a DOGE caucus in the Senate to work with Musk and Ramaswamy. Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, lead a similar group in the House with about three dozen House members, including a handful of House appropriators.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida became the group’s first Democratic member.

“If there are people who have legitimate suggestions about how we can improve the efficiency of government, perhaps bring technology into government, find out where there is waste and fraud, and save American taxpayer dollars, then we should do that,” Moskowitz continued Morning edition Thursday. “And it shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

More than just Congress

Musk and Ramaswamy say Trump can effect significant changes in the federal bureaucracy through executive actions alone.

In his book Truths: The Future of America Published in September, Ramaswamy outlines a possible DOGE playbook. In a section titled “The Path Forward,” he lays out a three-step plan.

The first step – “appointing a czar responsible for permanently taming the administrative state” – was already completed when Trump founded DOGE.

The second, he writes, is to involve lawyers in every agency to identify unconstitutional regulations.

And the third step: Present these findings to the president – ​​who could end regulation by executive order, cutting jobs and possibly entire agencies.

“The appointed czar could lay the groundwork as long as the president is willing to sign on the dotted line,” Ramaswamy writes.

And most recently, he posted on X that most government projects should have “a clear expiration date.” DOGE has one, he wrote: July 4, 2026.

New DOGE, old tricks

This is not the first attempt to get government spending under control.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan authorized the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also known as the Grace Commission. Businessman J. Peter Grace led the outside commission that produced a report with thousands of recommendations that Congress largely ignored.

A decade later, Vice President Al Gore founded the National Partnership for Reinventing Government with the goal of modernizing and streamlining government so that it “works better, costs less, and delivers results Americans care about.”

John Kamensky was the group’s deputy director and said they were “told by Vice President Gore, who led the effort, to avoid trying to move boxes but to repair what was inside.” And essentially, these were measures that did not require a congressional vote.” Legislation.”

Kamensky, now a senior fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration, said he was surprised at how many federal employees agreed to help him in his efforts to make things more efficient. He fears that Musk and Ramaswamy’s aggressive stance will alienate potentially helpful allies within the bureaucracy.

“If you start with fear and cutting, you can create resistance in a lot of people,” Kamensky said. “So there is a better chance of taking action with a positive vision than with a negative vision.”

Compared to the Grace Commission, the effort actually sparked change: more than 100 federal programs were eliminated and 250,000 federal jobs were eliminated.

“There’s a wonderful opportunity and it’s how it’s framed that matters and whether you include officials in the effort can be very helpful in achieving the results they want to achieve,” Kamensky said.

William Howell, founder and director of the Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, notes that these workers are simply implementing laws enacted by Congress.

“These are the people who keep our air clean, enable planes to land safely and ensure the meat we buy at the grocery store is disease-free,” Howell said.

He said that there are actually federal agencies that have conflicting goals and that this leads to inefficiencies like the ones that DOGE is desperate to eliminate. He pointed to the country’s “incredibly complex tax code” and an immigration system that “no one would consider acceptable.” However, for Howell, Musk and Ramaswamy’s rhetoric about “shutting down” entire agencies and laying off workers is a warning sign.

“You may need to remodel it and adapt it to contemporary uses,” Howell said. “But the way to get there is not to approach things with a sledgehammer.”