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.
But slashing the budget and substantially scaling back the federal work force is a formidable task. Among other things, it could require cutting popular programs that aid older Americans and reducing resources at agencies that support the nation’s defense and security.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump tapped two loyal supporters to help find ways to carve up the budget: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a former pharmaceutical executive who was once Mr. Trump’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Trump said the two would lead a new Department of Government Efficiency that would drive “drastic change.”
Mr. Trump has not set a dollar amount that he wants the commission to cut from the federal budget. Mr. Musk has.
After Mr. Trump promised on the campaign trail to tap Mr. Musk to head an efficiency commission, the entrepreneur said it could cut “at least $2 trillion” from the $6.75 trillion federal budget, without providing many details about how that could be done. Mr. Musk also said that the 400-plus federal agencies should be pared down to 99 or fewer, though a massive reduction in the number of agencies would require congressional approval.
In an acknowledgment of just how big of a challenge this poses, Mr. Trump said the new effort could be the “Manhattan project of our time” — a comparison to the resources put into developing the U.S. atomic weapons program during World War II.
What did Mr. Trump ask the commission to do?
Mr. Trump said its mission would be to help the administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies.” He gave it until July 2026 to finish its work.
The commission will operate outside the government, but will provide guidance and work with the White House budget office, Mr. Trump said.
It’s not clear who will pay for the commission’s staff, or if they will be paid at all: Mr. Musk said in a recent post on X that the “compensation is zero.” The “department” already has an account on X, Mr. Musk’s social-media platform, and Thursday said it was seeking “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” The post implied that Mr. Musk already had some staff working on the project, to winnow down the applicants. “Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” it said.
Can the administration cut $2 trillion in spending?
Despite Mr. Musk’s confidence, there are no easy options.
It’s not hard to find questionable spending in the federal budget. Medicare and Medicaid alone spent $100 billion on fraud and erroneous payments last year. But fraudulent payments are hard (and expensive) to screen out. And finding $2 trillion in savings would be thorny without cutting programs that Congress or Mr. Trump would want to protect.
Here’s the math, based on the 2023 budget: About a third of federal spending went to Medicare and Social Security, programs that aid older Americans. Mr. Trump has said explicitly that he will not cut those. Another 13 percent of the budget went to national defense. Based on his track record, Mr. Trump seems unlikely to make major cuts there, either. He massively boosted military spending in his first term, and has promised to “strengthen and modernize” the military in his second.
Another 10 percent of federal spending went to pay interest on the government’s existing debts. Mr. Musk has already cited that as an area of wasteful spending, recirculating an X post from his America PAC that identified interest payments as something the commission could “fix.” But it would be a risky place to pursue any cuts. The government already committed to making these payments, when it first borrowed the money. If the U.S. suddenly stopped paying them, the result could be a default that creates higher interest rates for average Americans and a potential recession.
What’s left?
That leaves about 40 percent of the budget. Cabinet agencies. Veterans’ benefits. Medicaid, which provides health care for the poor and disabled. Cutting $2 trillion from this sector alone would require huge cutbacks in services that Americans rely on. In the past, both Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress have called for cuts — even large ones — to some of these programs. But they’ve shown no appetite for chopping them on the scale Mr. Musk has promised. Even the Department of Education, a top target for conservatives this year, supports school districts across the country and has allies on both sides in Congress.
“To eliminate a third of the government, you would have to dramatically eliminate full functions of the federal government,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute. “You would have to dramatically scale back programs like Social Security, Medicare and defense and veterans. It’s not going to happen.”
Sharon Parrott, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said she worried that the point of the effort was not to reach Mr. Musk’s $2 trillion goal, but rather to change the terms of Washington’s budget debate. She said that Mr. Musk could allow Congress to decimate liberal priorities like education spending, by labeling them as wasteful.
“Any attempt to paint government writ large as rife with waste, as highly inefficient, and as unimportant, can be used in ways that are very damaging,” Ms. Parrott said.
Could Mr. Trump just defy Congress, and refuse to pay for things he thinks are wasteful?
By law, no.
Typically, the president’s role in the budget process is to propose a budget, then wait for Congress to decide what to spend. A 1974 law limits the president’s ability to refuse to spend funds after Congress has appropriated them (that refusal is called “impoundment” in Washington). Presidents can only refuse to spend money if Congress itself approves.
But Mr. Trump has reportedly considered declining to spend the money anyway, despite that law. Some Trump allies have suggested that the 1974 law is unconstitutional. So Mr. Trump could defy Congress, in the belief that he will win an eventual court challenge.
Could the administration slash the federal work force?
The federal government employs roughly 2.3 million civilian workers across the country, according to the most recent data from the Office of Personnel Management. About 85 percent of those employees live outside the Washington metro area.
Mr. Trump could try to reinstitute Schedule F, an executive order he issued late in his first term that would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees and make them more like political appointees who can be fired at will. President Biden revoked the order and his administration finalized a rule this spring that makes it harder to reinstate.
But firing thousands of employees risks impairing critical functions of the government, such as keeping airplanes from colliding and electrical grids from going dark. Mr. Trump could also find it difficult to drastically scale back the federal work force without cutting resources at agencies that support defense and national security.
More than 60 percent of federal civilian workers are employed by the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security, which includes border control, itself a top priority of Mr. Trump’s. The Defense Department makes up the largest share, employing about 34 percent of the work force. The Department of Veterans Affairs employs 21 percent.
Even if Mr. Trump could shut down the Education Department, that would not make a huge dent. The department employs only 0.2 percent of all federal civilian workers, according to Office of Personnel Management data.
The federal work force has not dramatically expanded over the past few decades, whereas the total U.S. population has grown substantially. In 1945, the civilian work force represented about 2.5 percent of the entire population, according to analysis from the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group. In 2023, that figure was about 0.6 percent.
That is in part because the federal government has relied more on contractors over the years, said Donald F. Kettl, a former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
How much does the government spend on federal employees?
In fiscal year 2023, the federal government spent more than $358 billion on pay and benefits for civilian workers in the executive branch.
The government also spends billions of dollars on contracts with outside companies and organizations each year. In fiscal year 2023, the federal government committed about $759 billion on contracts for services and products, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis.
The amount spent on contracts has consistently grown over time. In 2013, for instance, the federal government spent $476.2 billion on goods and services from contractors, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget.
There could be places for Mr. Trump and the commission to cut the work force, but the challenges that come with scaling back could make it difficult to see substantial savings.
“While there may be savings to be had by cutting government employees, it will not be a significant amount that makes much of a dent in the budget deficit,” Mr. Riedl said.
Hasn’t this kind of commission been tried before?
Repeatedly.
As far back as Theodore Roosevelt, presidents have set up commissions to streamline the federal government. In the 1980s, President Reagan gave the task to businessman J. Peter Grace, who recommended 2,478 reforms. In the 1990s, Vice President Al Gore led a “national partnership for reinventing government,” which recommended eliminating 250,000 middle managers from the executive branch.
Both efforts produced some real-world cuts in government, but fell short of their broadest ambitions. They were often led by outsiders, who struggled to work within the slow-moving machinery of government or to sway legislators.
“The fundamental changes need to be done through Congress,” said Tom Schatz, who leads the budget-watchdog nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste.
That means Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy likely will not need to win just one political fight to cut $2 trillion, but potentially hundreds or thousands of fights.
“Every program has a constituency. And the constituency in favor of spending money has always been stronger than those that want to reduce spending,” Mr. Schatz said.
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