Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are sharing details about how their newly created Department of Government Efficiency — which isn’t an official government department — plans to take aim at paring federal spending, with the two writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Wednesday that they are aiming to cut $500 billion in annual spending.
The announcement of DOGE has raised a host of questions, from whether Musk and Ramaswamy will have the authority to make changes in federal spending, typically controlled by Congress, as well as the group’s powers and how it will operate. Musk and Ramaswamy provided answers to some of those questions in their opinion piece, arguing that President-elect Donald Trump has the authority to cut spending authorized by Congress.
While Musk and Ramaswamy said they “expect to prevail” in cutting costs, there have been plenty of examples throughout the decades of efforts aimed at reining in federal spending, which have had only limited results. For instance, President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s tapped businessman J. Peter Grace to recommend reforms, resulting in about 2,500 recommendations for cutting spending, most of which were never implemented.
Musk has suggested slicing $2 trillion in annual federal spending, an amount experts say is unrealistic given that most of the nation’s $6.7 trillion in yearly outlays is spent on Social Security, Medicare and the military.
But in the Wednesday opinion piece, Musk and…
