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After Elon Musk said he “can’t wait” to work with Donald Trump in his potential return to the White House, the former president announced he plans to appoint the billionaire to a task force that will recommend “drastic” cuts to government spending.
In remarks to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump — “at the suggestion of Elon Musk” — proposed a “government efficiency commission” that would perform “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”
The commission will be “conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” if he is elected president, Trump said.
“We can’t keep going the way we are now,” Trump added.
“And Elon, because he’s not very busy, has agreed to head that task force,” he said. “If he has the time … He’d be a good one to do it.”
Trump — who has routinely praised Musk at campaign events while his fundraising arm has repeatedly mentioned how much Trump “loves” him — has now appeared to take on Musk’s idea for the task force after receiving his endorsement.
“I can’t wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go,” Musk wrote on X earlier this week in response to speculation that Trump would tap his support for his potential administration.
“This would unlock tremendous prosperity for America,” Musk wrote on Thursday.
Since buying influential social media platform Twitter, which Musk renamed X, for a whopping $44 billion in 2022, the company’s value has plummeted.
Musk’s takeover — supported by bank loans and a long list of investors — included mass layoffs and sweeping changes to content moderation, including the return of previously banned accounts, as watchdog groups accuse Musk and his platform of removing guardrails for disinformation and hate speech.
The company’s eight largest initial publicly disclosed investments are worth roughly $5 billion less than when Musk bought it two years ago, according to an analysis from The Washington Post. Their overall stake has shed $24 billion in value, effectively vaporizing hundreds of millions of dollars within months.
Musk’s potential role in federal government could pose a significant conflict of interest; his privately held SpaceX already is a major government contractor for the Defense Department, NASA and intelligence agencies, and his car company Tesla has benefited from an array of tax credits and government incentives to support electric vehicle manufacturing.
In his remarks on Thursday, Trump revived a pledge to eliminate 10 existing government regulations for every new one, which he proposed in an executive order during his presidency.
He also pitched raising tariffs on imports and repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, as the former president and his Republican allies take aim at funding boosts in recent Democratic-led proposals addressing the climate crisis and for the IRS to target larger corporations and wealthier tax dodgers.
His Democratic rival Kamala Harris supports President Joe Biden’s latest budget, which aims to raise more than $5 trillion in taxes over a decade, largely revolved around higher taxes and enforcement aimed at America’s wealthiest households and corporations — proposed changes that congressional Republicans have roundly rejected.
A memo from her campaign this week said Trump’s economic agenda “would cost trillions of dollars, explode the national debt, shrink economic growth, curb job creation, drive up inflation, and raise costs for middle-class and working Americans by thousands of dollars a year.”
“That is the consensus of a wave of new reports by experts from veteran reporters to financial services professionals to conservative-leaning economists,” according to a memo shared with The Independent.
Trump’s economic agenda is an ‘inflation bomb’ that would blow up the deficit and jack up costs on working families,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Alex Floyd told The Independent.
“The last time he was in office, Trump stacked nearly two trillions on the national debt to give billionaires and big corporations a tax handout before leaving the White House with the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover,” he said.
