DOGE: How Elon Musk could use his new meme "department" to target government employees and programs
SalonPresident-elect Donald Trump is gifting two of his most ardent billionaire supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, with control over a so-called Department of Government Efficiency and with it a supposed mandate to "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.” According to the announcement, DOGE will be an advisory department that operates "outside of the government" while partnering with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to carry out its agenda. Musk boasted that DOGE, a reference to his favored cryptocurrency Dogecoin, will send "shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” His recurring suggestion to cut government spending by a nearly a third, or $2 trillion, is outdone only by Ramaswamy's own proposal to cut as much as 75% of the federal workforce. For one, it's unclear how Musk will chart a $2 trillion cut when two-thirds of the $6.7 trillion federal budget goes to mandatory spending through programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while discretionary spending is largely used for military and defense programs that neither Democrats nor Republicans have much appetite for downsizing. On Thursday, the official X account for America, Elon Musk's Super PAC, posted a list of programs that it claimed $900 billion taxpayer dollars was being "wasted on" and that DOGE would "fix," including "Dr. Fauci's Monkey Business on NIH's 'Monkey Island,'" "DOD's Lobster Tank" and "'Real Fake': DHS's 1st Graphic Novel About Disinformation."