Trump names Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to ‘Manhattan Project’ for government cuts

Donald Trump has nominated billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly created office designed to fire workers and make drastic cuts to government funding.

The men who could be leading an Office of Government Efficiency — or DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite meme — “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,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk added.

Trump compared the office to the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first atomic bombs.

The president-elect teased a role for Musk in his administration earlier this year; Musk announced at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on October 27 that he intends to slash “at least $2 trillion” from the nation’s budget, or roughly by one-third.

The world’s wealthiest man has already pumped tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign while relying on an influential social media platform he owns, where he embraces right-wing influencers and conspiracy theories for an audience of more than 200 million users.

Musk also has business interests with China and Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s regime while his companies receive billions of dollars in US government contracts.

Their nominations raise immediate questions about conflicts of interest; Musk could be forced to divest from conflicting financial interests, including Tesla and Space X, and recuse himself from government matters involving X, the auto industry and a suite of other matters in which he is personally invested.

The name itself, DOGE, also appears to invoke the Musk-backed Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which has surged since Trump’s election.

A proposed Department of Government Efficiency “will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before,” according to Trump.

Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026, Trump said.

“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!” he added.

Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for the Republican nomination for president as a Trump booster, has previously endorsed mass government layoffs through executive actions.

“Large-scale reductions in force are absolutely the method that I’ll be using,” he said last year.

Right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute have also supported mass firings, targeting civil service workers and nonpartisan officials deemed disloyal to the president-elect’s agenda, and opening the door for an army of loyalists.

Ramaswamy told The New York Times last month that Trump’s first step in office should be “firing a lot” of employees — comparing those firings to Musk’s first months at Twitter, now X, which be bought for $44 billion then fired thousands of employees and effectively stripped content moderation from the platform.

“If you look at the efficiency commission that we’re talking about right now, is the goal of that to rehire a bunch of those bureaucrats?” Ramaswamy said. “That’s not the character of, certainly, what Elon did at Twitter, and I don’t think it’s going to be the character of what the most important part of that project actually looks like, which is shaving down and thinning down the bureaucracy.”

Musk, meanwhile, has appeared to concede that Trump’s sweeping economic agenda will tank the economy, and Americans could experience “temporary hardship” for “long-term prosperity.”

Trump’s announcement came amid a flurry of nominations from the president-elect to lead his administration when he takes office on January 20.

Government watchdogs say actual waste amounts to less than $300 billion a year. Last year, House Republicans fought off severe austerity budget proposals from their far-right flank, and Trump failed to make deep cuts to domestic programs during his administration after his signature sweeping tax cuts that largely benefited corporations and high earners. Trump now wants to make those cuts permanent.

Economists have argued that writing off one-third of domestic spending as “wasteful” would not only be devastating across the board, it would be practically impossible to implement.