Elon Musk plans to turn his newly appointed role slashing U.S. government bureaucracy into a game.
Appointed to run the newly created "Department of Government Efficiency", or DOGE, the Tesla CEO aims to make the experience both transparent and interactive by enlisting the help of the American taxpayer. This would include a virtual suggestion box as well as ranking some of the worst examples of federal waste.
“We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars,” Musk posted. “The entertainment value will be epic.”
Late on Tuesday, the Trump transition team announced it had picked Musk to run DOGE, a newly created entity named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency. (However, DOGE is not a real department, like the State Department, because only Congress has the power to create new departments.)
Together with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk has been tasked with slashing regulations and expenditure deemed either excessive or wasteful, restructuring federal agencies and, last but not least, dismantling the bureaucracy.
Musk said Americans were welcome to bombard him with suggestions for where he should wield his axe. "Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know," he wrote, adding that "all actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency."
Fulfilling a long held Republican dream
“Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time,” Trump wrote in a statement issued by his campaign transition team.
In the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, the federal government spent $6.75 trillion, more than the $4.92 trillion raised in taxes and duties.
The remainder, raised through the issue of interest-bearing Treasury notes that are subject to the appetite of the bond market, has contributed to the ballooning of the national debt. Investors including hedge fund legend Paul Tudor Jones have likened the debt to a ticking time bomb.
In a similar comparison, the President-elect likened DOGE itself to the creation of atomic weapons: “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.”
Trump said the work of Musk and Ramaswamy would conclude no later than the Fourth of July in 2026, as a gift to the American people on the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
'DOGE' to soon begin crowdsourcing ideas
Ramaswamy, a native of Cincinnati, said his work on the new taskforce was more important than his own personal ambition to run for the Ohio senate seat that will be vacated by Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance.
Declaring he was bowing out of contention, Ramaswamy said he was already going to start fielding suggestions before the Trump administration even takes office.
“DOGE will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud and abuse,” he wrote. “Americans voted for drastic government reform and they deserve to be part of fixing it.”
There is however already an authority tasked with auditing Uncle Sam and rooting out wasteful or fraudulent spending of taxpayer dollars—the Government Accountability Office.
How the new DOGE taskforce would coordinate its role with the GAO remains unclear, as does the question of what this could mean for Musk’s other businesses.
The entrepreneur already splits his time between numerous responsibilities running Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and his latest artificial intelligence startup xAI. He also owns social media platform X, where he runs its product development operations.
Neither Elon Musk nor the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment from Fortune.
Precious little maneuvering room
The $1.83 trillion shortfall in the most recent annual federal budget, the third highest in history, has economists and business leaders including Musk worried that the U.S. government is on the fast lane to bankruptcy.
Were Musk to be successful in lopping off $2 trillion from the government bill, he would effectively turn the U.S. from running a deficit into a fiscal surplus. Given the last time Uncle Sam was in the black came around the turn of the century, it would be a herculean feat even for someone as business-savvy as Musk.
But it’s entirely unclear from where these savings will come as there’s usually very little maneuvering room so long as the main driver—entitlements—remains untouched.
Typically two-thirds of federal spending is mandatory, including Social Security and Medicare. A much smaller chunk classified as discretionary is approved by Congress every year, with the single biggest line item going towards defense. Finally, about a tenth of the budget is earmarked for servicing the national debt.
