With his son With him came Vivek Ramaswamy, the other person in charge of the self-proclaimed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an entity that does not actually exist as a public body, but that will advise President Donald Trump from outside the Government to reform the Administration.
Musk did not specify his proposals, but this Thursday he once again showed his obsession with forcing public officials and employees to go to work in the office. “If we exclude security guards and maintenance staff, the number of officials who come in person and work 40 hours a week approaches 1%. Almost no one,” he said. The tycoon believes that a large part of the officials will leave their jobs just by forcing them to work in person.
The presence of the richest man in the world caused some commotion on Capitol Hill. Musk met with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, and the leader of the Senate Republicans, John Thune, while Ramaswamy met with small groups of congressmen. Groups have been formed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (caucus) monitoring and support for the DOGE, which aim to identify items to cut. The two later went to a larger assembly of Republican representatives and senators.
“We’re going to see a lot of changes here in Washington,” Johnson said before that meeting. The president of the House of Representatives showed his support for Musk’s idea of requiring in-person work from officials. “One of the first things I think you’ll see is a demand from the new administration, and from all of us in Congress, that federal workers get back to their desks and get back to the work they’re supposed to do,” he said. . “What you are going to see here, the predominant theme, is a return to common sense and a return to responsibility and efficiency in government,” he argued.
Congress, through its two chambers, is responsible for approving public spending and budgets. Previous presidents who have tried to cut federal spending have encountered the interplay of interests of legislators who have blocked the most ambitious proposals. This time, a large part of Republican congressmen support the idea of cuts, at least in theory. It is more complicated to put it into practice.
Musk, whose companies are among the largest beneficiaries of aid and public contracts, has promised to cut up to two trillion dollars in spending (about 1.9 trillion euros, at the current exchange rate). That represents around 30% of the 6.7 billion annually spent each year by the federal Administration. However, the largest items correspond to the interest on the debt (which is not in question that will have to continue being paid) and defense spending (which Trump has promised to increase). Along with this are benefits that do not even require annual budget authorization, such as social security, payments to military veterans or public health insurance, which Trump has also promised to respect during the campaign and which have the majority support of Congress.
When these items are excluded, what Musk proposes to cut is more than what is spent in the rest of the agencies and departments of the federal government, so the accounts do not match the commitments. That does not prevent Musk and Ramaswamy from finding some examples of waste and oversized spending with which to score some victories.
