Trump lets the DOGEs out, but is it enough to fix the federal budget?

After business magnates Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy campaigned on behalf of Donald Trump, many were probably left wondering what roles they might take in a Trump administration.

Now we know. Their task is to make the government operate like a well-run business.

“President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to cut wasteful government spending, fire what he considers rogue bureaucrats and overhaul federal agencies once he is back in power,” reported The New York Times. This is a tall task, and now that Trump has stormed back, he apparently wants help to achieve this lofty goal.

In order to scale back government spending, Trump appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, with the acronym of DOGE as an homage to an internet meme. It also reminds me of the terrible 1998 song: “Who let the dogs” (or DOGEs in this case) out, but never mind that for now.

Getting government budgets under control is necessary and long overdue. As I have written before, the U.S. is on an unsustainable path. We have been running massive deficits and own a national debt of $36 trillion and counting, and getting the government back on track looks like a herculean task.

To staff the DOGE, the department’s X account put out a request for applicants: “We need super high-IQ, small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” Musk added, “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies, and compensation is zero.” I am not sure this will draw the nation’s top talent to cut government spending, and there’s a lot to cut too.

Our budget sits at around $6.75 trillion, and our annual revenue was $4.92 trillion in fiscal year 2024. While Trump hasn’t publicly set a goal for how much to cut, Musk — ever the ambitious optimist — wants to cut around $2 trillion, which would eliminate our deficit.

You really don’t have to look too hard to find wasteful spending. Within Sen. Rand Paul’s annual Festivus report, he outlines a host of enraging earmarks. Among his findings from 2023, the U.S. funded research on transgender monkeys, efforts to boost Egyptian tourism and studying walking dogs in the summer. Of course, cutting these ridiculous line items won’t get the country out of the red, but there are ways to do so.

Reforming entitlements, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; restructuring debt to secure lower interest rates; eliminating unnecessary departments; privatizing some government services; cutting foreign aid to countries that hate us; and reducing federal funding that is transferred to states, given that they have the means to tax and fund their own services, would get us closer.

I am 100 percent supportive of getting the country back on stable financial footing, and I really don’t doubt that Musk and his fellow DOGEs will be able to pinpoint where to make cuts — that’s actually the easy part. Obtaining approval to ratify cuts will be daunting. For starters, while presidents can use executive orders to save taxpayers considerable amounts of money, they don’t have the power of the purse or ability to unilaterally cut agencies — Congress does. So Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy need congressional support, which presents a major obstacle.

Drastically cutting the federal budget isn’t particularly popular by and large. Doing so often means reducing public services and subsidies that many congressional members’ constituents support. Will Congress risk the voters’ ire to do what is right and balance a budget?

I cannot remember a time when Congress had the courage to make substantive cuts. Despite numerous attempts to rein in spending, the U.S. hasn’t balanced a budget in over 20 years. In the past, the feds have relied on budgeting gimmicks to give the appearance of taking our financial crisis seriously, but it amounted to little.

Many experts doubt that Congress will find the fortitude this time. “To eliminate a third of the government, you would have to dramatically eliminate full functions of the federal government. You would have to dramatically scale back programs like Social Security, Medicare, and defense and veterans. It’s not going to happen,” the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl told The New York Times.

While I appreciate Musk and Ramaswamy’s objective, it doesn’t seem like they necessarily need help identifying cuts or ways to make government more efficient; think tanks — including my employer the R Street Institute — have been providing answers for years. Rather, the DOGE needs help squeezing Congress into doing its job: working to balance the budget.

Trump gave the DOGE a deadline of the summer of 2026 to finalize its recommendations. While Americans ought to be rooting for Musk and his DOGEs, we will see how it pans out. For now, we at least know who let the DOGEs out — Trump.