Fred Exley
2024-11-21 17:45:36 UTC
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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government
Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run
the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal
edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations”
promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each
year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary
expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even
his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil
servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from
firing thanks to civil-service protections.
This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It
imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we
have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters
decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and
they deserve to get it.
President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed
Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal
government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy
represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have
abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We
are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers,
not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or
advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll
cut costs.
We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean
team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest
technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new
administration closely with the White House Office of Management and
Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three
major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions
and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through
executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing
new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with
a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President
Biden’s tenure.
In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices
held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic
or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do
so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron
doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal
agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority.
Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal
regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.
DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided
by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations
enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to
President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the
enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and
rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit
regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.
When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will
allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive
overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat
that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking
deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies.
The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding
burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of
executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress
is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent
mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future
president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would
instead have to ask Congress to do so.
A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial
logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.
DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify
the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform
its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The
number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to
the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer
employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would
produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly
limited. Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated
with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into
the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them
incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments
to facilitate a graceful exit.
Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop
the president or even his political appointees from firing federal
workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from
political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force”
that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the
president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That
power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil
service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in
Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they
weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did
so. With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of “rules
governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative
overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies
out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the
office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations
that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American
taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.
Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers.
Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through
executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act,
which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by
Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is
unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely
side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view,
DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500
billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by
Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535
million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5
billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million
to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.
The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many
federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits
conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield
significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh
consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little
idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics
claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without
taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which
require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer
magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to
end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive
actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.
With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the
Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions
in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from
entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the
moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the
need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set
for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its
250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make
our Founders proud.
Mr. Musk is CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. Mr. Ramaswamy, a businessman, is
author, most recently, of “Truths: The Future of America First” and was
a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
President-elect Trump has named them co-heads of the Department of
Government Efficiency.
By Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020?mod=hp_opin_pos_0