Trump's Department of Government Efficiency will face issues

Musk, Ramaswamy will target federal jobs, agencies, regulations

Atkinson said Ramaswamy has discussed cutting 50% of federal jobs within the first year. Federal employees account for only 1.9% of the U.S. workforce, or around 2 million employees, Atkinson said.

"I don't know what planet he's living on, but that just goes beyond ridiculousness," he said.

Ramaswamy, a businessman and author, ran for Republican presidential nominee and campaigned to reduce federal jobs, deregulate the government and shut down government agencies, including the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service. He also campaigned to "cut wasteful expenditures" by authorizing the White House to submit budget requests to Congress instead of individual agencies.

Atkinson said Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X, has also discussed reducing the number of federal agencies -- of which there are more than 400 -- to 100. While Atkinson said reorganization and consolidation shouldn't be off the table, massive reorganization is a significant task.

Atkinson said some of the plans for the Department of Government Efficiency are "completely crazy ideas."

"There's no way you can cut all those agencies," he said. "Are you going to cut the Federal Election Commission?"

Along with cutting federal agencies, DOGE will assess agencies' rulemaking and enforcement authorities. The Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have already faced legal challenges over rules they created, such as the noncompete ban and climate reporting.

In a statement posted on X, Ramaswamy said eliminating regulations isn't a policy preference but a "legal mandate." He pointed to several U.S. Supreme Court decisions from earlier this year, including Loper Bright v. Raimondo, Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors and SEC v. Jarkesy, which limited federal agencies' ability to interpret the laws they're charged with administering and reduced the agencies' power overall to create and uphold new rules.

Musk echoed the goal to reduce regulations.

"The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation," Musk said on X. "We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good."

Atkinson said the efficiency effort could focus on low-hanging fruit, such as reforming government procurement rules.

"There are lots of things you could do that would streamline regulations," Atkinson said.

Sarah Kreps, a law professor at Cornell University and director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy, said she anticipates that DOGE might be more successful in cutting red tape for business projects rather than restructuring federal resources and agencies.

She added that while there can be some benefits to bringing in new, outside perspectives on the issue of government inefficiency, it can result in false promises to fix longstanding issues previous administrations failed to solve.

"It can lead to an ill-founded and unwarranted idealism about what's actually possible in something as vast as the U.S. bureaucracy," she said. "Maybe this time it's different, but I think there are such deep structural forces that will make this more challenging than they have any reason to believe."

A monumental challenge

The most significant obstacle facing the Department of Government Efficiency lies in attempting to improve government efficiency through federal agency and budget restructuring, Atkinson said.

"Every administration comes in and they say we're going to cut waste, fraud and abuse," Atkinson said. "The minute they get in office, there's some foreign policy challenge and nothing ever happens."

Kreps said eliminating inefficiencies is difficult.

"I think everyone would agree that there are areas within government that are redundant or inefficient," Kreps said. "But what we've seen in the past when there have been efforts to tackle this problem, it quickly runs into roadblocks."

Trump has said that he wants an entrepreneurial approach to government. Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that while Trump's plan for the government to become more entrepreneurial is notable, it will likely be an insurmountable challenge because the federal government is not structurally similar to a company.

"It's easy to say they're going to bring a business mentality to government but that often is hard to implement," West said.

Kreps said the private sector's goal is to earn money, and the federal government wants to keep people safe.

The Department of Defense, for example, might draw ire for being inefficient, Kreps said. The DOD contracts with several companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and SpaceX for space exploration projects.

Kreps said the DOD doesn't want to be dependent on one company to reach space. It's not about saving money, it's about spending money to develop redundancy, she said.

"You can look at that from a government efficiency perspective and say 'that is a waste of billions of dollars to be spending on multiple contractors developing plans to go to space,'" she said. "But the government looks at that and says 'space is really important to us and reliability and access to that is important. So important, that as a rich country that is putting space and innovation at the center of great power competition, we're willing to pay a premium for that redundancy.'"

West said he expects widespread adoption of AI and other emerging technologies as the Trump administration attempts to improve government efficiency.

The government lags behind the private sector in use of digital technology, such as chatbots, something Musk and Ramaswamy will likely want to change, he said.

"Republicans have talked about unleashing AI and I think they will do that," he said. "But it's always complicated to bring business processes to government."

Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining TechTarget Editorial, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.