As he ran for the Republican nomination for president, the wealthy entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy took daily digs at his more powerful rival, Donald J. Trump, saying that the former president’s heart was in the right place but that only Mr. Ramaswamy had the knowledge and street smarts to enact the policies that would truly “make America great again.”
His plan, he freely said, was radical: slashing the federal work force by 75 percent, 50 percent in Year 1, and eliminating large swaths of the federal government.
Now, as the co-leader of what President-elect Trump has called the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Ramaswamy might actually have the chance to prove his ideas could work. Whether the American people will buy what he and his co-leader, Elon Musk, are selling is a different question.
“There will be no political messiah coming from the White House on high to save us,” he said last year in a lengthy speech laying out his plans. “If we are going to be saved, we have to save ourselves.”
With around 2.2 million civilian employees, not counting the military or the U.S. Postal Service, the kind of downsizing that Mr. Ramaswamy outlined during his presidential bid — as many as 1.65 million layoffs — would have repercussions for the economy and communities across the country.
There is skepticism about what the Department of Government Efficiency can do, however, and how great its influence will actually be. In announcing its creation with Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy at its helm, the president-elect said the department is not actually a department — “it will provide advice and guidance from outside of government” — and it is not permanent. Its “work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026,” the nation’s 250th anniversary, Mr. Trump said.
The “department,” as sketched out might not even be legal. The Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 governs outside panels, mandating strict transparency rules, advanced notice of public hearings, the release of documents, even the appointment of people with differing views. Progressive groups used that law to stymie similar efforts in Mr. Trump’s first term, and they are gearing up again.
“If there is a massive effort to dismantle a 2.2 million-strong civil service in this country, there will be a massive legal effort to stop it,” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive of Democracy Forward, one such group.
And yet Mr. Trump cloaked the effort’s announcement in glamour, calling it “potentially ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” aiming “to liberate our economy, and make the U.S. government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’”
Much of the attention since the DOGE was announced on Tuesday has been on Mr. Musk, among the richest men in the world, whose business ventures, especially his SpaceX company, could be richly rewarded by recommendations to slash federal employment and move work to government contractors. The acronym DOGE echoes the name of Mr. Musk’s favored cryptocurrency, dogecoin.
But it is Mr. Ramaswamy who has thought through and campaigned on the mechanisms of a radical downsizing of government, with or without congressional approval.
He has said the president has the power to eliminate the Department of Education, F.B.I., I.R.S., Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Day 1, by presidential fiat. And he maintains that the Supreme Court’s decision in June to sweep aside a longstanding legal precedent and reduce the regulatory power of federal agencies has given the incoming president the power to reduce regulations by more than half.
Beyond his assertions of power, Mr. Ramaswamy is given to citing a blizzard of federal legal codes to back his bluster.
For instance, he says one remote corner of federal law gives the president the power to conduct mass layoffs without regard to civil service protections. Small-scale reductions in force might run into a dizzying array of civil service protections, but by going big those can be swept away, he says. The president need only give a 60-day notice and explain the order of the firings, for instance, whether seniority or veterans’ service will grant some protection.
Mr. Ramaswamy particularly loves an obscure 1977 law passed by President Jimmy Carter, the Reorganization Act, which states that “the president shall from time to time examine the organization of all agencies and determine what changes are necessary to carry forth the policies in this statute.”
In that language, Mr. Ramaswamy sees the key to the wholesale elimination of agencies, departments and government functions.
Others don’t.
“In the last Trump administration, they had massive reorganization plans, and they all foundered on the fact that there is no statutory or constitutional authority to reorganize the entire executive branch,” said Eloise Pasachoff, who teaches administrative law and public administration at Georgetown Law School.
But Jacqueline Simon, the policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal government workers, does not dismiss the assertions out of hand. The proliferation of judges appointed by Mr. Trump and the dominance of conservative jurists on the Supreme Court have thrown past precedent and legal assumptions into some doubt.
“We’re at this weird moment where the rule of law can’t be taken for granted,” she said, before catching herself and adding, “No, it’s science fiction. Even I who always thinks the worst can’t take this too seriously.”
For instance, that Carter-era law has never been used for the wholesale reorganization of government and seems to have expired. In signing the law, Mr. Carter noted in 1977, “Although the bill before me extends the reorganization authority for 3 years instead of the 4-year period I requested of Congress, it does provide some flexibility that has not been available to other presidents.”
Ms. Simon noted that presidents do have the authority to lay off workers if there is no money to fund them or their work, but Congress provides that money, not the president. Richard M. Nixon, another president often accused of abusing his power, often got around that issue by withholding — or “impounding” — money appropriated by Congress.
Congress grew so incensed by the encroachment on its constitutionally prescribed powers of the purse that it passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to mandate that money approved by Congress must be spent by the executive branch under the president’s obligation to faithfully execute the laws of the land.
Since it was signed, the closest example of a president withholding money allocated by Congress was Mr. Trump’s decision to delay military aid to Ukraine as he pressured the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce an investigation of his political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., said Thomas S. Kahn, a longtime Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee. Even then, the money was eventually spent — and Mr. Trump was impeached for his actions.
“Until it is overturned or repealed, that is the law of the land, period, end of discussion,” Mr. Kahn said.
But niceties such as existing law and precedent may not always stand in the way. The fear is that Mr. Trump, on the advice of Mr. Ramaswamy, will simply carry out sweeping layoffs and wholesale agency closures, sending workers home while their cases wend their way through the courts. If and when the layoffs are deemed illegal, those workers might have long drifted away, to other employers or other states.
And a Republican Congress has already proved compliant to Mr. Trump’s norm bending. After Congress declined to give him money for his border wall, then-President Trump simply took it from the military. In years past, lawmakers have jealously guarded their constitutional powers. In 2019, though, they declined to stop him, even after he had taken $3.6 billion from 127 military construction projects around the country.
The once and future president is certainly not resting on precedent. Last year, as part of his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to restore what he called “the president’s long-recognized impoundment power,” though he nodded to working with Congress. That might mean asking Congress, which will be fully under Republican control, to repeal the Impoundment Control Act, but Mr. Ramaswamy has said such a step would be unnecessary.
The law, he has said, is unconstitutional and therefore not binding.
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