An ambitious effort to reduce the size of the federal government in the second Trump administration is encountering skepticism from seasoned government observers and watchdogs who wonder whether the billionaires leading it know what they’re getting into.
Still, the budget cutters' targets could include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which was already a target this year in deliberations over a new farm bill.
Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading the advisory group dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, outlined their plans in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week that proclaimed their goal is to “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.”
Those functions would be reduced considerably, the two said, because recent Supreme Court decisions “suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.” They estimate Trump could nullify “thousands of such regulations.”
They plan to use sweeping measures to cut the government – ordering federal employees back to the office five days a week, which they expect would lead to a mass exodus; presidential “reductions in force,” and relocating agencies out of Washington, D.C., which Trump’s USDA did unilaterally with USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture during his first administration, shipping them to Kansas City, Missouri.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they wrote.
Elon MuskMusk and Ramaswamy won’t be the only ones working to downsize the government. In Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, are launching their own efforts.
Ernst revealed “22 easy steps” to cut $2 trillion in federal spending in an X thread Nov. 25. One of those was eliminating BEAD, a rural broadband program that has so far spent $42 billion “but has connected zero people to the internet.” Ernst also has called for eliminating some USDA research grants.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) also is offering ideas, releasing a set of proposals Tuesday that could save $1.4 trillion.
The list includes reversing the Biden administration's update of the Thrifty Food Plan, a model of food costs used to set SNAP benefits. The list urges restricting future TFP updates. Reversing the earlier update would have the effect of cutting current benefits, while restricting future updates would slow growth in future benefits, which would still be adjusted to reflect inflation.
Restricting future updates, saving $40 billion, has a good chance of being enacted by a GOP Congress, since the provision was included in the House Agriculture Committee farm bill this year. Reversing the earlier update would save $180 billion, according to CRFB, but likely would divide Republicans.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s op-ed landed like a bombshell in the Washington area, home to the federal government and close to 20% of all federal employees.
“Everyone across the political spectrum should be concerned about DOGE and the plan outlined by Musk and Ramaswamy, because what they are proposing to do is have outside groups step in and assume power that has normally been delegated to Congress or to the executive branch, with no transparency and rife with conflicts of interest,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Musk's companies have secured $15.4 billion in government contracts over the past decade, the New York Times reported last month. Ramaswamy, who founded drugmaker Roivant Sciences, has been critical of FDA's deliberate decision making on new drugs, including use of a "two-trial system." FDA Commissioner Robert Califf told the Washington Post in an article about Ramaswamy's criticisms of FDA, "“I would just say, the amount of money he has invested and what’s at stake speaks for itself.”
Robert WeissmanDOGE is not a government department, which only Congress can create. It is, in fact, an advisory committee that should be subject to the requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, says Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen
“These requirements include establishing fair balance and representation on the committee, holding open meetings and maintaining and preserving records available to the public,” Weissman and co-president Lisa Gibert wrote in a letter this month to Trump transition co-chairs Howard Lutnick, picked to be Trump’s commerce secretary, and Linda McMahon, chosen to head the Department of Education.
In their op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy say they are helping the Trump transition team “identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America.” DOGE will work with “legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology,” to apply Supreme Court rulings that limit agency discretion to interpret laws passed by Congress.
But the court decisions cited, one in a Clean Air Act case involving power plant emissions and another that overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine, don’t give Trump the power to simply stop enforcing federal regulations, Weissman said.
“That’s a completely fallacious interpretation,” Weissman said. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, in order to rescind a rule, agencies have to go through the same process they used to issue it in the first place, including gathering public comment. Just as it can often take two years or more to get a rule in place, withdrawing and replacing a rule cannot be done simply by issuing an executive order, as contemplated by Musk and Ramaswamy, he said.
Susan Dudley, founder and senior scholar at George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center and formerly head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget, told Agri-Pulse she thinks the plan to work with OIRA makes sense.
“That's an office that I think could help them identify where … there may be opportunities to be more efficient,” she said.
But Dudley said reliance on the court’s Loper Bright decision overturning Chevron “will cut both ways for them.”
“One of the consequences of the Loper decision is that it is going to make it harder for agencies to change their mind every four to eight years on what their statute tells them they can do,” Dudley said. “If an agency has been interpreting their statute the same way for a long time, I think courts are going to say, hey, under Loper, that's what we should give deference to, not some new interpretation. So, I think that can go both ways.”
Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at of the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy institute, took aim at the Musk/Ramaswamy embrace of presidential impoundments – refusing to spend money authorized by Congress.
President Richard Nixon tried the maneuver a few times, but the courts said it was illegal, and Congress then passed a law prohibiting presidents from using impoundments.
But Musk and Ramaswamy said Trump believes that statute is unconstitutional, “and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”
“We had all the [court] precedent, but then we also passed the law making it illegal,” Kogan said. “And they just say, well, we want to do it anyway. That is, I think, what makes this stuff so dangerous.” He added that Ramaswamy, when running for president, said he wanted to cut 75% of the federal workforce.
Brian RiedlCongress “wouldn't vote to just completely defund NIH, completely defund the U.S. Marshals, completely defund veterans’ health care,” Kogan said.
Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says DOGE needs to be more surgical in its approach to cutting the federal government and give up trying to eliminate entire departments.
“Yes, the federal government is excessively bloated—the Department of Agriculture bursting with nearly 100,000 full-time equivalent employees is particularly egregious,” Riedl writes. However, he adds that “federal civilian employment has remained around 2 million for at least 40 years, even as the demands on the federal government have soared.”
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) shows that federal outlays as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product have remained relatively flat over time. The percentage began rising steadily during the Great Depression and hit about 40% in 1944 and 1945 before dropping quickly.
More recently, that percentage was 30% in 2020, at the height of COVID, before falling to about 22% last year, virtually the same as it was in 1983 during the Reagan administration.
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