How DOGE and Elon Musk Could Actually Cut Trillions in Federal Waste

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As you may know, our felonious president-elect put mega-billionaire Elon Musk and mere billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a commission—though not an actual government department, because only Congress can create those—named for the same silly dog meme as Musk’s favorite “shitcoin.” But even in an advisory role, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency could cause significant upheaval if Congress and agency chiefs follow its lead, or if Donald Trump launches a flurry of executive orders—and then lawsuits are filed and everything is messy and chaotic and journalists are all in a tizzy, just as Trump likes it.

DOGE’s supposed goal is to identify $2 trillion in savings and reduce the size of government—and the deficit—by slashing federal waste and redundancy. (It’s been tried before, with limited success.) Based on their activities and statements, Musk and Ramaswamy would accomplish this by gutting the federal workforce, eliminating certain agencies, slashing regulations, ending selected entitlements, and, as a corollary, privatizing as much as possible as quickly as possible.

For starters, the DOGE bros have proposed killing veteran’s health benefits, Pell grants, Head Start, and the Bureau of Prisons—which simply means the government would spend its “savings” on contracts with private prison companies, and what could go wrong? They also seek to eliminate the National Institutes of Health, which would be a disaster for US leadership and innovation in science, because the NIH funds most basic biomedical research—work that brings about lifesaving drugs and procedures and vaccines, which, whatever you may think of them, have saved millions of Americans from gruesome deaths.

But suppose, for a moment, that DOGE’s mission is earnest.

There’s a far richer target that nobody, indeed not the DOGE boys, has been talking about: wasteful tax breaks. These wouldn’t be spending cuts, technically speaking, but they amount to the same thing, as evidenced by the fact that the government calls them “tax expenditures.” And what is more wasteful, honestly, than giving considerable breaks to people who don’t need them?

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