Elon Musk to lead Trump's cost-cutting DOGE 'department'

November 13, 2024 09:57 AM

Elon Musk silhouetted against the USA flag

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Starlink, Tesla, X and xAI will have a role in the upcoming second Trump administration, having been appointed to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk was rewarded for throwing his financial weight behind Trump in November's election with a role that will provide the next White House with advice on efficiency and cost-cutting — a position he will share with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Musk said DOGE will work to “drain the swamps. There are so many swamps.”

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Described by Trump as “potentially the Manhattan Project of our time,” the transition team said in a statement that DOGE will support the White House to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies essential to the ‘Save America’ movement.”

It’s unclear at this time how DOGE will operate. Despite being named a department, DOGE — which shares its name with the meme coin cryptocurrency previously promoted by Musk — will not be a real government department.

If DOGE were an official federal agency, staff including Musk and Ramaswamy would be required to disclose assets under existing rules that apply to federal employees to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

As DOGE would not be an official department, the pair would be free from adhering to federal ethics rules around transparency.

Despite dodging the rules though, Musk claims the new group will be “very transparent.”

“We're going to be very open and transparent and be very clear about this is what we're doing,” Musk said at a rally in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in late October. “We're going to make the spending lower. And if somebody's got a better idea for how to make the spending lower, tell us. But if we don't, we're going to bankrupt the country.”

Musk’s role as part of the 47th presidential administration has been on the cards for some time, with Trump suggesting Musk could have taken on a newly created cabinet role as the Secretary of cost-cutting.

In the wake of his DOGE appointment, Musk retweeted a raft of speeches from Republican senators on what they perceive as excess spending on projects for AI-enabled smart toilets, COVID-related studies, and the impact of playing video games.