When Elon Musk was asked on the campaign trail how much he thought the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could “squeeze” out of the Biden-Harris administration’s $6.5 trillion budget, he said: “I think we could get at least $2 trillion out of it.”

Musk, who is already pursuing DOGE goals with Vivek Ramaswamy for the new Trump administration, is known for achieving ambitious goals. But even the most ardent supporters of eliminating government waste and cutting bureaucracy are skeptical that such an amount could be cut from the annual budget.

Elon Musk speaks to Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, NY, on Sunday, October 27, 2024. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“It seemed like he was saying $2 trillion a year, which is frankly a ridiculous number,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), said in an interview with FOX Business. “It’s extremely unlikely that you can reduce the deficit by $2 trillion a year – if you work really hard. And if you only go after things that you would call waste (or) inefficiency, that’s just not the case.”

Goldwein noted that $2 trillion is more than the total amount the U.S. government spends on non-defense funds, and while it appears that DOGE will also be looking at increased efficiency in defense, the number is close as high as the government’s total expenditure on funds.

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Excluding interest payments – which now exceed defense spending – the budget is $6 trillion, and the biggest part of the spending program is Social Security, followed by Medicare and Medicaid and other mandatory obligations that cannot be touched.

While cutting $2 trillion a year might be a difficult task, Goldwein says cutting the trillion over a decade wouldn’t be that difficult, and CRFB has laid out several ways to do just that.

Last month, CRFB reported that President-elect Trump could save the U.S. $1.4 trillion over the next decade alone by reversing President Biden’s executive actions, and the bipartisan group also identified additional deficit reduction options of $700 billion, which is low-hanging fruit – so simple and relatively bipartisan.

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While DOGE’s goals may be overly ambitious, the CRFB still applauds the initiative.

When Musk reached out to Succeed!” and pointed to a list of ideas that could generate $2 trillion in savings within a decade.

Goldstein says there are many options for the government to make cuts, and CRFB is working hard to lay out all of them. The nonprofit will continue to release options for cuts that would amount to tens of trillions of dollars over a decade.

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“We’ll look at everything,” Goldstein told FOX Business. “But these options will not all fall into the category of waste, and many of them will be things that one party or both parties will not like, and so we think: make it as big a universe as possible, and then become hopefully they select a subset of all of them.