Can Musk Dismantle the Deep State?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday to outline what they styled “The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.” DOGE is, of course, an acronym for the prospective Department of Government Efficiency whose mission will be to reduce the size of the administrative state and strip its unelected bureaucrats of the enormous power they unlawfully wield over the American people. Musk and Ramaswamy explain that President-elect Trump has asked them to take on this task and why: “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long.”

Those politicians have not merely abetted the metastasis of the bureaucratic cancer that afflicts Washington. Congress increasingly passes legislation that unconstitutionally cedes its lawmaking power to the apparatchiks. This is most often done by Democrats when they want to surreptitiously expand federal power. The usual method is for legislators to include a vaguely defined requirement in a new statute and instruct the bureaucrats to fill in the details “at the discretion of the Secretary.” This process is how the notorious contraception mandate ended up in Obamacare and was weaponized to persecute the Little Sisters of the Poor. It was likewise used to enable the worst excesses of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Fortunately, the Democrats will be unable to pass any new boondoggles until 2027 at the earliest and President Trump will own the veto pen until January of 2029. This will give Musk and Ramaswamy ample time to launch their DOGE plan and monitor its execution, which they will do without pay as outside volunteers. And, as they put it in the Journal, “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.” One way they plan to achieve that goal involves working closely with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on regulatory rescissions, which will in turn permit them to implement personnel reductions throughout the government:

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.

Inevitably, the contemplated cuts are already being portrayed in the corporate media as “brutal,” but Musk and Ramaswamy take a more businesslike view: “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.” And they are indeed staying home. As Marc Fisher recently reported in the Washington Post, “Only 6 percent of federal workers are working full-time in their offices; 30 percent are fully remote.” Musk and Ramaswamy anticipate an executive order from President Trump requiring most federal employees to physically report to work five days a week. They believe this alone would result in a “wave of voluntary terminations.”

Most critics of the DOGE plan denounce the anticipated personnel reductions and ignore how Musk and Ramaswamy anticipate arriving at the point where such cuts will be possible. Indeed, few of their critics appear to have read their Wall Street Journal manifesto. The Hill quotes University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley, who sniffs: “If what they’re saying is agencies can now adopt different regulations without going through the administrative process, because they think they’ve got some clincher of a legal argument, I think they’re going to find out very quickly that the courts are not likely to be sympathetic.” This was said in response to what they wrote concerning DOGE and the Supreme Court:

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

Musk and Ramaswamy believe that many of the 441 federal agencies that make up the administrative state have promulgated rules that won’t survive legal scrutiny: “DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these [SCOTUS] rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.” This will yield a long list of illegitimate regulations, and how much they cost, which will go to President Trump: “When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach.” Musk and Ramaswamy are aware that they will meet enormous resistance. “We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington.”

They nonetheless believe they can cut federal overspending by “taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress,” and expect to finish the project by July 4, 2026. The big question is, of course, the following: Can DOGE succeed where the Grace Commission and numerous other reform initiatives failed? Neither Elon Musk nor Vivek Ramaswamy are ordinary men. They are smarter and more creative than the denizens of the deep state. Moreover, they will be working with a bold president who doesn’t mind breaking things. Nevertheless, as Ronald Reagan famously phrased it, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

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