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DOGE duo reveals how Trump will shrink and improve the government
President-elect Donald Trump
announced last week that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new federal agency, the Department of Government Efficiency.
The duo tasked with dismantling the federal bureaucracy, slashing unnecessary regulations, optimizing government spending, and restructuring government agencies provided a clear sense in a
op-ed Wednesday of how DOGE would operate as well as its strategy moving forward.
At the outset, the duo noted that the country is effectively run by unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats.
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.
With the understanding that this dysfunctional state of play is "antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders' vision," the duo emphasized the need to remedy the bureaucratic bloat and indicated how DOGE would help.
Musk and Ramaswamy are apparently now helping the Trump transition team form a group of "small-government crusaders" that will work hand in glove with the
White House Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the implementation of the president's vision across the executive branch.
The duo, touting themselves as "outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees," would advise this group in pursuit of deregulation, mass layoffs, and cost savings.
Deregulation
Rather than rely upon new or existing legislation to effect change, DOGE will rely largely on executive action, guided by the Constitution and two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings:
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v. Raimondo.
'The Constitution does not authorize agencies to use pen-and-phone regulations as substitutes for laws passed by the people's representatives.'
In West Virginia v. EPA, which was decided in June 2022, the high court considered whether a federal agency, in this case the EPA, could adopt a consequential regulatory scheme without Congress first conferring it the authority to do so.
Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the opinion of the court that the decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at a level that would force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate energy is a decision "of such magnitude and consequence [that it] rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body."
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his concurring opinion, "The Constitution does not authorize agencies to use pen-and-phone regulations as substitutes for laws passed by the people's representatives. In our Republic, 'it is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society.'"
In
Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which was decided in June 2024, the high court overruled the Chevron doctrine that previously had courts defer to a regulatory agency's interpretation of federal legislation in cases where the law in question was ambiguous or silent on an issue.
The Supreme Court ruled that courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority and that they may not defer to an agency interpretation of a law simply because a statute is ambiguous.
Musk and Ramaswamy noted that these two cases "suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law."
Granted there are hundreds of federal agencies, each of which have turned out oodles of rules and regulations in recent years, this could prove a herculean effort.
The Federal Register, the daily archive of rules and regulations,
reportedly ended 2023 with over 90,000 pages and America ended up with another 3,018 federal rules on the books. This year, federal agencies passed 66 significant rules in April alone, 34 of which the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University indicated were economically significant.
'Identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible ... functions.'
The duo indicated in their op-ed that legal experts embedded in federal agencies will employ advanced technology to more swiftly apply the two Supreme Court rulings to such federal regulations. They did not specify which technology, but generative artificial intelligence systems could certainly come in handy.
DOGE will present its findings of rules likely voided by the two rulings to 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."
Pre-empting accusations of executive overreach, the duo stressed that 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."
Mass federal layoffs
Extra to eliminating bureaucratic red tape that does not belong, the duo plans on handing out pink slips to superfluous bureaucrats en masse. After all, Musk and Ramaswamy figure that fewer rules on the books would likely require fewer enforcers:
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.
Likely anticipating accusations of callousness, the duo indicated that the droves of bureaucrats driven out of federal agencies will be afforded help transitioning into the private sector. Those unwilling or unable to hack it in the world of real competition might alternatively be provided incentives for early retirement or severance payments for voluntary exits.
'If I had to commute, I would resign.'
The duo further signaled how Trump could get around statutory civil-service protections and the caltrops President Joe Biden lay in the way of rules shielding bureaucrats from accountability: The president could apparently execute "reductions in force" that do not target specific employees and "prescribe rules governing the competitive service," thereby "curtail[ing] administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area."
Among the rules that might prompt bureaucrats to jump ship would be requiring them to show up to work five days a week.
"If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home," wrote the duo.
A number of federal bureaucrats speaking to CNN under the condition of anonymity confirmed that they would not be able to complete a return to the workplace.
"The stress would be through the roof," said one bureaucrat. "I am at the point where if I had to commute, I would resign. I would take this as a sign to move on and start a new chapter in my life."
Cost savings
While the duo and Trump figure the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which bars the president from cutting expenditures authorized by Congress, would not survive a challenge before the Supreme Court, DOGE would instead take 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 DOGE account on X, which has been highlighting possible cuts and savings, highlighted a Congressional Budget Office report in July that noted $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 was associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations. $320 billion of that total was provided for activities whose authorities expired over 10 years ago.
Extra to defunding Planned Parenthood and other outfits to the extent they can and making sure taxpayer money is not squandered on partisan pet projects lacking congressional re-authorization, the DOGE duo seeks to re-examine the federal government's procurement process and push for large-scale audits during temporary payment suspensions.
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