House Speaker Mike Johnson intends to cut 75 percent of all federal agencies with the help of Elon Musk’s outside commission known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“We certainly hope” to slash the number of federal agencies from 428 to 99, as Musk has vowed, Johnson said in response to a question from Fox News host Martha McCallum in an interview Wednesday night. “We want to be willing partners in that,” he added.
He noted he aims to cut all funding for PBS and Planned Parenthood. “I would like to, that’s for sure,” said Johnson.
As for dismantling agencies, “We have the opportunity to go in and really take back control from the administrative state,” he said.
“For a long time they’ve been acting as judge, jury and executioner on the rules that they make on industries and small business owners and the rest,” he added. “We have the ingredients, we have the conditions right now to actually be ablemake really dramatic change.”
Johnson said dismantling the goverment will be part of “the playbook to unleash and unroll in January.”
Johnson added on X on Wednesday night: “Under President Trump, we will take a blowtorch to the administrative state and reduce the size and scope of government,”
He conceded in the Fox interview: “We got to build consensus to have the votes to do that. Where Congress is involved, that’s where it takes the hard work of legislating and getting everybody on the same page.”
But he emphasized that some of the work can be accomplished by executive order. President-elect Donald Trump “has a broad authority to do a lot of that,” he noted
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former GOP presidential candidate who will head up DOGE (the name of Musk’s bitcoin), are meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
The two billionaires have been tasked with firing federal workers and cutting government programs and federal regulations. Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to chair a new House Oversight subcommittee to oversee DOGE.
Attempts to slash the federal government have been resisted in the past as Americans grapple with cuts to programs they know and trust. Millions of Americans depend on these programs for jobs, health care, security, and other needs.
Trump has appointed people to his administration hellbent on slashing the size of the federal government, such as Russ Vought, the former and next head of the Office of Management and Budget.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on November 20, Ramaswamy and Musk cited a key Supreme Court case mentioned by Johnson on Fox News that they view as authorization for the draconian cuts.
“In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so,” they wrote.
“In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law,” the duo added.
