Reprint of WSJ Opinion written by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decades long
executive power grab.
Nov. 20, 2024
Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run
the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal
edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations”
promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each
year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary
expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or
even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed
civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as
immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.
This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It
imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we
have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters
decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change,
and they deserve to get it.
President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed
Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal
government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing
bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and
politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things
differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as
outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike
government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write
reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.
We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean
team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest
technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new
administration closely with the White House Office of Management and
Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three
major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative
reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving
change through executive action based on existing legislation rather
than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S.
Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued
during President Biden’s tenure.
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. 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.
DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies,
aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal
regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of
regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action,
immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate
the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals
and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and
stimulate the U.S. economy.
When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will
allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive
overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative
fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes
lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within
federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for
lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront,
but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly
bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the
Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully
rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive
them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.
A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial
logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.
DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to
identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it
to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated
functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least
proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified:
Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but
the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority
is properly limited. Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve
to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their
transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to
give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary
severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.
Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop
the president or even his political appointees from firing federal
workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from
political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force” that
don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the
president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That
power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil
service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in
Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they
weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they
did so. With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of
“rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail
administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of
federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal
employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave
of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t
want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-
era privilege of staying home.
Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers.
Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through
executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control
Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by
Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is
unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would
likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that
view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the
$500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized
by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from
$535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5
billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million
to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.
The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken.
Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale
audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would
yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh
consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little
idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics
claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking
aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require
Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer
magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to
end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive
actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.
With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on
the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural
reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the
onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to
prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is
to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration
date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our
nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government
that would make our Founders proud.
Mr. Musk is CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. Mr. Ramaswamy, a businessman,
is author, most recently, of “Truths: The Future of America First” and
was a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
President-elect Trump has named them co-heads of the Department of
Government Efficiency
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