The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the non-governmental advisory body Donald Trump has tasked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with using to identify trillions in federal spending cuts, is now officially recruiting.
“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE,” the group wrote on X on Thursday. “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Elsewhere, Musk admitted that the working conditions at DOGE aren’t exactly typical.
“This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote on X. “What a great deal!”
As The Independent has reported, the DOGE is unprecedented on a number of levels, with a billionaire with billions of dollars of business tied up with the federal government presiding over a mandate to review trillions in spending.
Trump has specified that the DOGE is technically “outside of government” — only Congress can create a new actual department, and an official body, the Government Accountability Office, already recommends government savings — but the Musk-Ramaswamy outfit could still have an enormous impact, especially if Trump follows through with the pair’s open suggestions of cutting thousands of employees from the government alongside the spending programs in their crosshairs.
Musk has shown a willingness to make big changes to cut costs in his other ventures, even if they’re controversial. When he took over Twitter and turned it into X, he reduced company staff by some 6,000 people, triggering a wave of lawsuits.
"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity," he told employees that remained. "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
However, those looking for him to right the financial ship of the federal government might find cause for concern in X’s performance.
Fidelity Investments, one of the firms that backed Musk’s 2022 purchase of the social media site, has reported the value of its stake has declined by almost 80 percent since Musk took over. Extrapolating such losses to the rest of the site’s backers suggests X has lost $9.2bn in value during the Muska era.
Observers have suggested that Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposed $2 trillion in cuts are almost impossible, or at least highly undesirable, given that they could eliminate most all discretionary government spending outside of mandatory payments to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
"This is the first warning sign that this is going to be a failed operation," Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who managed the Clinton Administration’s spending-focused National Performance Review, told CBS MoneyWatch. “That’s insane."
