Who has not one day dreamed of a world rid of its useless or, worse, harmful junk? This is the stroke of marketing genius behind the Department of Government Effectiveness specially created for Musk and Ramaswamy, a biotech and finance billionaire once a candidate in the Republican primary before rallying behind Trump. In the form of an anti-establishment wink, the acronym of the said department (Doge, in English) is the name of a favorite cryptocurrency of Musk.
On paper, the adventure is unprecedented: the richest man in the world is given carte blanche to reform the administration of the world’s leading power in his own way. In reality, things may be a little more complicated. First of all, the new Department is not one. It is not an official government agency created by an act of Congress; it has no authority per se. He also took his first steps in offices rented by SpaceX a stone’s throw from the White House with chief recruiter Steve Davis, a former engineer of the space company renowned for his ability to work (16 hours a day) and the harshness of his management (he orchestrated the big housecleaning at Twitter).
The ambition of this commando? Musk believes that the federal government “should be able to get by with 99 agencies” (compared to 441 existing). Among those expected to disappear or be fundamentally reorganized are the Department of Education, the FBI, theInternal Revenue Service (federal tax collector), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the Nuclear Regulatory Authority or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (department responsible for enforcing the law on weapons, explosives, tobacco and alcohol).
A favorite target of Planet Trump is the Consumer Protection Agency, a structure created at the initiative of Barack Obama. Another priority of the Doge: interpret as broadly as possible the president’s freedom of (de)regulatory action, relying on the probable support of the Supreme Court.
-How do the two leaders of the Doge intend to go about cutting staff numbers? Firstly, by disgusting recalcitrant civil servants. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would lead to a wave of voluntary departures that we welcome,” they write in the Wall Street Journal. According to Ramaswamy, simply being required to return to the office full time will result in the immediate departure of a quarter of the federal workforce. Faced with such an offensive, civil servant unions are sharpening their legal weapons.
Cumulative salaries of civil servants are worth $200 billion to $250 billion a year, only one-eighth of the deficit, and more than 60 percent of these federal agents are employed by military or security-related agencies, which Trump plans to strengthen. It is therefore in the programs that we will have to cut. Federal spending is divided into three categories: debt service ($882 billion in 2023), which must be financed, mandatory spending (such as retirement or health insurance for seniors, to which Trump promised not to touch), which constitute by far the largest chunk ($4.1 trillion), and finally the “discretionary spending”. It is the latter who are most threatened by the Musk-Ramaswamy tandem. But they will be difficult to trim: the Department of Education, for example, devotes more than half of its 274 billion annual budget to granting loans and grants to students, and half of the expenditure of the Ministry of Transport goes to aid to States and local authorities for the construction of highways, bridges, etc. These aids are popular.
If the Doge achieved even a tenth of his goal of 2,000 billion “cuts”, it would be a revolution. To achieve this, Musk and his ally planned to put pressure, via the social network X, on elected representatives of Congress. It is impossible to say whether this desire to twist the arms of traditionally spendthrift parliamentarians will be crowned with success or if it will rob elected officials. Much will depend on a Trump whose deficit reduction has never been an obsession: during his first term, the public debt increased by 8,000 billion.
