(The Center Square) – President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has yet to get off the ground, but its leaders have already promised to cut the federal government down to size by eliminating thousands of regulations.
Trump introduced DOGE – led by Tesla boss Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election. The announcement generated speculation throughout Washington and the surrounding areas about how much an outside group could accomplish during Trump’s second term.
On the campaign trail with Trump, Musk initially suggested DOGE could cut $2 trillion in spending. Congress controls the purse strings for discretionary spending, which totaled about $1.7 trillion in 2023. That same year included mandatory outlays of $3.8 trillion, more than half of that was for Social Security and Medicare.
Musk said this week that the group will aim for $2 trillion, but likely come up with half that amount.
“I think if we try for 2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting 1 [trillion],” Musk said during a livestream conversation on X on Wednesday with Mark Penn, a political strategist. Musk said the $2 trillion target was a “best-case outcome.”
Mandatory spending – which is about two-thirds of annual federal spending – does not require an annual vote by Congress, but is required by exisiting law. One example of mandatory spending is the Social Security Act, which requires the government to provide payments to beneficiaries based on predetermined factors. On the discretionary side, Congress generally allocates more than half of the discretionary budget to national defense.
John Kennerly Davis, senior attorney at the Federalist Society and former deputy attorney general for Virginia, said DOGE will have to decide how it goes about overhauling federal regulations. Some camps favor improving existing regulations over outright elimination.
“So as this discussion between elimination and improvement plays out, the president could … consider a couple executive orders that I think are entirely consistent with the DOGE initiate that would also focus on improvements to regulations that regulated entities have long sought,” Davis said.
Davis suggested an executive order that would require agencies to give regulated companies more time to decide how to proceed instead of forcing companies to either comply or mount potentially costly legal challenges. Davis said companies often face a Catch-22 with cost-heavy regulations in deciding whether to either not comply and sue or comply and sue. Both can be expensive, depending on the outcome of the legal challenge. Davis noted such an executive order could face legal challenges.
Trump laid out lofty goals for DOGE.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project,’ of our time,” Trump said in November 2024. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”
The original Manhattan Project was a research and development project during the second World War that led to the creation of nuclear weapons.
