Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have already dispatched emissaries across the US government ahead of their mission to slash public spending as joint heads of Doge (the department of government efficiency), a non-governmental body body ordered by Donald Trump to help realize his goal of a radical government shake-up.
The two tech billionaires have already sent aides to more than a dozen federal agencies as they look to identify possible cuts, according to the Washington Post.
The agencies include the treasury department, the Internal Revenue Service and the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services.
Hiring for Doge is already under way, the Post reports, with more than 50 staffers already working out of the offices of SpaceX, Musk’s rocket-building enterprise, in Washington DC. The eventual hiring goal is 100 workers by the time of Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.
Doge will not have the status of an official government agency, despite its lofty goals, and the pair have reportedly been encountering suspicion and resistance among career workers at government departments – partly fuelled by critical comments they have previously made about the civil service.
Some are said to regard the men as naive and arrogant about the complexities of reducing public spending and regulatory red tape, according to the Post.
While Musk has previously set a target of $2tn in spending cuts, he has recently acknowledged that this figure might be unattainable.
“I think we’ll try for $2tn. I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” he told a technology trade show in Las Vegas this week
“But I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for $2tn, we’ve got a good shot at getting $1 [trillion].”
Despite Musk’s near-ubiquitous recent presence as part of Trump’s inner circle, the limits of his ability to affect spending appeared to be demonstrated shortly before Christmas when Congress amended a short-term spending bill he had criticised but still included many of the specific expenditures that he publicly complained about.
Musk – who contributed about $275m of his vast wealth to Trump’s election campaign – claims to have been deluged by applicants since advertising for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week” on X, the social media platform he owns.
Some have applied by sending him direct messaging, on occasion including their IQs.
The crowd-sourced recruitment drive has been followed by more structured attempts to fill specific roles. After Christmas, Doge announced it was seeking full-time staff for salaried positions in the fields of information technology, human resources and finance.
Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company, has been drafted in as a key leadership figure, while recruitments have been made to focus on specific areas, such as legislation and regulation.
