What Can Doge Do?

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The meme-inspired name of the commission led by Elon Musk and the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is a bit of a misnomer: DOGE stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, but the commission will not actually be a federal department (those have to be formed by Congress). Instead, it will be an advisory body, one without the practical authority or enforcement ability to enact the lofty goals it has so far put forth.

DOGE’s leaders have promised to slash $2 trillion in government spending through cutting budgets and axing government jobs. The details on how they would do so are hazy: The costliest buckets of government spending—Social Security, Medicare, and military spending—are all effectively off-limits. President-Elect Donald Trump has lately been promising that he won’t cut the first two, and the third is politically tricky to cut, especially for a Republican. Still, even if the two achieve only a sliver of the ambitious cuts they’ve put forth, they could manage to alter government agencies and services that affect Americans’ lives.

Musk and Ramaswamy appeared on Capitol Hill yesterday to speak with lawmakers. The visit did not illuminate much about their plans: Their talks, as The New York Times put it, were “remarkably efficient.” Each delivered one-minute remarks that included lots of criticism of the government but few solutions. Two Republican allies observing that the government spends a lot of money and is in a lot of debt is not groundbreaking. Musk has promised that DOGE will bring about “shock waves,” and Trump said it could be “The Manhattan Project” of our time. But for all of DOGE’s flashy rollout and the bombast of its messengers, the message is not so different from the ones delivered in earlier administrations.

Past presidents have convened panels of business leaders to try to make the government run in a more streamlined fashion, but they have not managed to radically transform the bureaucracy, in part because they encountered the same block that DOGE eventually will hit: the need for congressional approval for cuts. Presidents can make requests to Congress about budgets, but generally, Congress makes decisions about allocating federal funds. So far, DOGE’s concrete proposals involve calling federal employees back to in-person work (seemingly with the hope that many would quit) and planning to eliminate daylight saving time. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy identified targets, including public broadcasting and international aid, from which to slice relatively small amounts of funding. They also suggested that they are eager to adopt massive regulatory changes (which could well bring about conflicts of interest for Musk, whose businesses rely on federal contracts) using Trump’s executive authority, although they haven’t specified what these will be.

A sad reality of this situation, my colleague Annie Lowrey noted this week, is that a commission that actually helped the government better serve the needs of the American people would be a good thing, and would likely be supported by Americans on both sides of the aisle. Many sections of the government really do run inefficiently. But the current Republican plan confuses useful reform with dramatic slicing.

Because of DOGE’s inability to implement policy on its own, the leaders’ plan relies heavily on the president-elect who invited them to serve. Trump’s team has floated a way to give him broader oversight of the federal budget: Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, has argued that Trump has the power of impoundment, the authority to refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress. In 1974, Congress’s Impoundment Control Act forbade the practice. But Vought has claimed that the act was unconstitutional and should be repealed, and he is taking up this mantle again. Actually getting a court to rule in agreement with Vought could be a long process, but it would mean a significant expansion of authority away from Congress and toward the executive branch if it works, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews has explained.

DOGE has begun hiring on X—and promises to keep its workforce small (it’s not yet clear where the funding to hire employees will come from). It’s hard to see how Musk and Ramaswamy could find a path to trillions, or even billions, in cuts without touching the Trump no-gos of Social Security and Medicare. If, somehow, Musk and Ramaswamy did get into the Social Security pot, the lives of millions of seniors would be profoundly changed. If they cut Medicare, ditto. But the likelier outcome is that they will piddle around on the margins, all while frequently posting and podcasting. Viral grandstanding is very likely to bump up against the sheer facts of how the government works.

Related:

• The American people deserve DOGE.
• What to expect from Elon Musk’s government makeover

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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