Why Elon Musk’s move to cut Fed spending could work when others failed

• Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tasked with cutting expenses and red tape.
• Past presidents have created committees with the same goals, and they have had mixed results.
• Trump may find it easier than Reagan or Clinton to get Congress to act.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy vow to tame the federal government. They are not the first.

But unlike Reagan and Clinton, both of whom largely failed in their efforts to curb federal spending and sprawl, their Department of Government Efficiency has a crucial advantage: Republican control of both chambers of Congress.

That political reality means their ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion in spending through budget reconciliation could require just 51 votes in the Senate — with Republicans expected to retain 52 seats.

Despite the name, Musk and Ramaswamy’s panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, will not be a government department. Substantial changes to the federal budget will most likely require action from lawmakers, though Trump transition officials are reportedly looking for ways to short-circuiting the power of Congress above expenses.

But the two men appear well positioned to advise Trump on how to implement the deepest cuts to the federal government in generations.

Previous presidents have tried to cut the federal budget with varying degrees of success

The federal government is not a corporation. Decisions about which agencies get what money for what purpose and how the money is collected are made in Congress. Lacking the awesome power of a corporate CEO, former presidents including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have struggled to tame the beast.

“There are a lot more restrictions on what you can and can’t do,” said David Walker, a fiscal watchdog who headed the Government Accountability Office from 1998 to 2008. “There are a lot of cultural barriers.”

In 1982, Reagan commissioned J. Peter Grace, a chemical executive, to create a team of private-sector “bloodhounds” to wade through the government in search of waste and inefficiency.

Two years later, his team of about 160 senior business leaders, later known as the Grace Commission, published more than 2,000 recommendations that they said would save more than $424 billion over three years.

However, the government’s internal budget experts did not think the changes would have as much impact as the Grace Commission. Most of the proposals required acts of Congress that never materialized. Some changes, such as improving the government’s debt collection efforts and reducing headcount among certain groups of federal workers, were implemented by the executive branch, bypassing Democrats in Congress.

The nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste, which continued the Grace Commission’s mission, said last year that the U.S. government had cut spending by a total of $2.4 trillion since the 1980s through recommendations from the Grace Commission and from the nonprofit organization itself. Musk has claimed that his committee could cut nearly that much spending in one year.

Clinton made another attempt to cut federal spending and improve government processes with his National Performance Review, which was led and staffed by federal employees rather than the private sector.

The initiative succeeded in shrinking the federal workforce by more than 300,000 workers during Clinton’s term, although the groundwork for some of those cuts was laid under Reagan. But only about a quarter of his proposals requiring legislative action succeeded in clearing Congress.

In 1999, the Clinton administration claimed it had saved $137 billion. The The Government Accountability Office said that figure included some double counting and nearly $25 billion, which was only “consistent with” the initiative’s focus on “reinventing government.”

Musk and Trump’s efforts could go further. Trump said the DOGE committee would have until July 4, 2026 to come up with a plan, but Musk said in a post on

What’s different this time

Any proposals from Musk and Ramaswamy that Trump accepts would have a much better chance of passing Congress than those from Reagan or Clinton’s committees, because Republicans are on track to control both chambers of Congress.

Reagan’s and Clinton’s committees encountered a Congress at least partially controlled by the other party. While controversial bills often cannot clear the Senate because they require 60 votes to overcome the filibuster, many spending-related proposals can pass with a 51-vote majority through a process called budget reconciliation. The Republicans will gain 52 seats starting next year.

Thomas Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said Trump would likely have at least two chances to pass a budget through reconciliation. The fact that Musk and Ramaswamy have had a two-month head start before Trump is sworn in also helps, he said.

These government efficiency efforts “can be set up more quickly,” he said. “It depends on how many members the president would like to have on the committee, and I have no idea. They didn’t ask me. My suggestion is to keep the committee smaller.’

In the past, Musk has said the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has sued him twice, is “devastated” and has accused the Federal Aviation Administration of delaying SpaceX launches with “Kafka-esque paperwork.”

In recent posts on Congress has not been discussed in recent posts, but in 2022 Musk tweeted which he preferred when the presidency and Congress were controlled by different parties.

In a September appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast, Ramaswamy outlined a thought experiment for downsizing the federal workforce: fire all unelected federal employees whose Social Security numbers end in odd digits, and then fire half of the remaining employees, those whose numbers start with odd digits.

He argued that this arbitrary 75% reduction – about 2.2 million workers – would avoid discrimination lawsuits while leaving government services barely affected.

Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the libertarian think tank Mercatus Center, has said Musk and Ramaswamy could save $2 trillion if they embraced what many other economists would consider radical reforms. She said ending aid to states — which the Cato Institute estimated at $697 billion in 2018 and $721 billion in 2019 — could go a long way, as could chipping away at corporate wealth for sectors like pharmaceuticals and electric cars.

But she also expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s ability to build the bridges that might be needed for major change. “They’re going to piss everyone off for stupid reasons,” she said.

There are also third tracks of political spending that some doubt Trump will be able or willing to address, even if Musk and Ramaswamy advise him to do so.

Social Security and Medicare are the two largest areas of federal spending, and changing them could be politically unpopular. Trump has generally said he won’t touch them — except abolishing social security taxes payments, which would mean fewer benefits for retirees in the future.

Earmarks, which allow members of Congress to send money back to their own districts and states, are another major source of federal waste, and even a Republican Party-led House and Senate may be reluctant to get rid of them .

“The motivation in politics is to make friends,” De Rugy said. Everyone, she added, loves a ribbon-cutting ceremony.