Trump taps Musk and Ramaswamy to lead 'DOGE' — a symbolic agency with massive ambitions
President-elect Donald Trump made clear Tuesday what he wants billionaire loyalists Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to do in his next administration: lead a department that isn’t expected to be a real federal agency to cut government spending.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”),” Trump said in a news release Tuesday night. “Together these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
Elizabeth Landers, a Scripps News national correspondent covering disinformation, noted in a social media post that the acronym for the non-existent agency “also happens to be the cryptocurrency (dogecoin) that Elon Musk is all in on.”
ALSO READ: Do not submit: Your guide to a way out of this catastrophic mess
“I think there are real questions tonight about what that's going to look like in the sense it’s being led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins told Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night.
She noted that any new federal agency would require congressional approval and that there was not a sense that will happen here or that this is "necessarily a real, genuine agency.”
New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro later said on the network that she found Musk’s conflicts of interest as a government contractor “extremely problematic.”
“So the fact that he’s going to be going in and trying to cut people and departments that regulate him and his businesses is extremely problematic,” she said.