Count me as one of the skeptics, but I would love to be proved wrong.
First off, the only thing Musk cares about is making sure Chinese EV manufs don't clean his clock in the US. He's got Donald to protect his tuchus. Is he worried about us? Sure he is!
Cutting Washington spending isn't like taking the hatchet to Twitter. For one Defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up almost 60% of our budget. Then add 13% for interest payment on our massive $30 trillion in debt. That's about 75%. Most of that stuff is mandatory and not easily cut.
Good luck. I'll believe it when I see it.
The Musk-Ramaswamy Project Could Be Trump’s Best Idea
Skeptics sneer, but the duo are serious about shrinking government.
By The Editorial Board
Nov. 15, 2024 5:40 pm ET
Lost amid Donald Trump’s nomination blitz this week was what might turn out to be his best idea: He has handed Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk the job of running a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reform and shrink the federal government.
This has been tried before, not least by businessmen appalled by government waste and delay. But Mr. Trump and the two entrepreneurs seem to be serious. They’re promising a reform “Manhattan Project,” after the effort that produced the atomic bomb. They may need at least a neutron bomb to do the job.
The DOGE will be a non-government operation working with allies inside the White House. The policy “vector,” as one source puts it, will be the regulatory shop in the Office of Management and Budget. The goal is the rapid repeal of regulations and a “massive” reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy, with or without the help of Congress.
The duo are convinced they have enough legal authority to pull this off in the executive branch. The legal theory of the case is that the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPAand Loper Bright rulings reining in the administrative state mean that much of what the federal government now does is illegal.
Mr. Trump has set a laudable goal of eliminating 10 regulations for every new one, and there is no shortage of targets. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Wayne Crews says 217,565 rules have been issued since the Federal Register first began itemizing them in 1976, with 89,368 pages added last year.
DOGE’s first order will be to pause enforcement of overreaching rules while starting the process to roll them back. Mr. Trump and DOGE could direct agencies to settle legal challenges to Biden rules by vacating them. This could ease the laborious process of undoing them by rule-making through the Administrative Procedure Act. A source tells us they’ll do whatever they think they legally can without the APA.
The DOGE duo believe this will provide the legal justification for reducing the federal workforce. As we recently noted, the federal head count has ballooned by 120,800 during the Biden years. Civil service and union protections make it hard to fire workers.
But Mr. Trump will quickly resurrect the Schedule F reform that he sought to implement at the end of his first term but was scrapped by Mr. Biden. These would eliminate job protections for high-level federal employees so they can be removed like political appointees.
DOGE could also streamline permitting with “categorical exclusions” from environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The Biden Administration provided such exclusions for green-energy projects. Trump appointees could do so for more projects that are likely to have minimal environmental impact like oil and gas pipelines in developed rights-of-way.
The DOGErs also promise to attack redundant, unnecessary and ineffective programs. Take the plethora of government work-training programs and funding for medical research that the private industry is already doing. Some but not all of this might require legislation.
Mr. Musk says he wants to slash $2 trillion from a $6.5 trillion budget, which is fanciful without touching Social Security and Medicare, which Mr. Trump won’t do. But there are other ripe targets, such as fraud in Affordable Care Act subsidies. The Paragon Health Institute estimates such fraud at $15 billion to $20 billion this year. Agencies could also move to fixed-price contracts so taxpayers aren’t on the hook for contractor cost overruns.
The Health and Human Services Department could bar states from exploiting a Medicaid loophole to squeeze more money out of Washington to balance their budgets. HHS could let states impose work requirements on able-bodied, working-age Medicaid enrollees, and bar states from using Medicaid funds for other social spending. The Trump team could also roll back the Biden climate and wage mandates on federal contractors, which make it harder for smaller companies to compete.
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None of this will be easy. Lawsuits will proliferate. Mr. Trump’s own cabinet officers will resist cuts in their budget and regulatory sway. The iron triangle of the bureaucracy, interest groups and Congress will conspire to portray every decision as a threat to public health and safety. The press will pile on.
But the attempt to tame and shrink Leviathan is worth the toil, and it’s essential to liberating Americans from the tyranny of the expanding administrative state.
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