US President-elect Donald Trump has named Elon Musk for a role aimed at creating a more efficient government, handing even more influence to the world’s richest man who donated millions of dollars to help get him elected.
The Tesla boss and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead a newly-created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump indicated will operate outside the confines of government.
Trump said in a statement that Mr Musk and Mr Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The president-elect said the new department will realise long-held Republican dreams and “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” signaling the Musk and Ramaswamy roles would be informal, without requiring Senate approval and allowing Musk to remain the head of electric car company Tesla, social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX.
The new department would work with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach” to government never seen before, Trump said.
The work would conclude by July 4, 2026 - the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Mr Musk, ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world, already stood to benefit from Trump’s victory, with the billionaire entrepreneur expected to wield extraordinary influence to help his companies and secure favorable government treatment.
With many links to Washington, Mr Musk gave millions of dollars to support Trump’s presidential campaign and made public appearances with him.
Adding a government portfolio to Mr Musk’s plate could benefit the market value of his companies and favored businesses such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
“It’s clear that Musk will have a massive role in the Trump White House with his increasing reach clearly across many federal agencies,” equities analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a research note.
“We believe the major benefits for Musk and Tesla far outweigh any negatives as this continues to be a ‘poker move for the ages’ by Musk betting on Trump,” Mr Ives said.
The move was criticised by Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights NGO that challenged several of Trump’s first-term policies.
“Musk not only knows nothing about government efficiency and regulation, his own businesses have regularly run afoul of the very rules he will be in position to attack in his new ‘czar’ position,” Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. “This is the ultimate corporate corruption.”
Trump likened the efficiency effort to the Manhattan Project, the US undertaking to build the atomic bomb that helped end World War Two, while Mr Musk promised transparency.
“All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency,” he said on X, inviting the public to provide tips.
“We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining,” Mr Musk said.
Mr Musk said at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in October that the federal budget could be reduced by “at least” $2trillion. Discretionary spending, including defence spending, is estimated to total $1.9trillion out of $6.75trillion in total federal outlays for fiscal 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“Your money is being wasted and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that. We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook,” Mr Musk said at the rally.
The acronym of the new department - DOGE - also references the name of the cryptocurrency dogecoin that Mr Musk promotes.
In August Mr Musk and Tesla won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing them of defrauding investors by hyping dogecoin and conducting insider trading, causing billions of dollars of losses.
Dogecoin has more than doubled since Election Day, tracking a surge in cryptocurrency markets on expectations of a softer regulatory ride under a Trump administration.
Shares in Tesla fell on Wall Street ahead of the announcement but are up about 30% since the election.
Mr Ramaswamy is the founder of a pharmaceutical company who ran for the Republican presidential nomination against Mr Trump and then threw his support behind the former president after dropping out.
Meanwhile, Trump stunned the Pentagon and the broader defence world by nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as his defence secretary, tapping someone largely inexperienced and untested on the global stage to take over the world’s largest and most powerful military.
The news was met with bewilderment and wide-eyed worry among many in Washington, as Trump passed on a number of established national security heavy-hitters and chose an Army National Guard captain who is well-known in conservative circles as a co-host of Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends Weekend.
Hegseth’s choice could bring sweeping changes to the military, as he has made it clear on his show and in interviews that, like Trump, he is stridently opposed to “woke” programmes that promote equity and inclusion. He has also questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes.
In June, at a rally in Las Vegas, Trump encouraged his supporters to buy Hegseth’s book after vowing that if he won: “The woke stuff will be gone within a period of 24 hours. I can tell you.”
