President-elect Donald Trump announced this on Tuesday Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new employment agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump said in a statement that the two “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle the government bureaucracy, eliminate redundant regulations, reduce wasteful spending and restructure federal agencies – essential to the ‘Save America’ movement.”
Trump appeared to suggest that Musk and Ramaswamy might not formally join the administration, explaining that the two would “provide advice and guidance from outside the administration, and work with the White House and the Office of Management & Budget to implement large-scale achieve structural reforms. and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.”
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In his own statement, Musk said the new agency will “send shockwaves through the system, and through everyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people!”
Trump set a deadline for their work in his statement, saying it would “end no later than July 4, 2026.”
“A smaller government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift for America on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” Trump wrote. “I am confident they will succeed!”
Trump’s campaign described the agency as “potentially the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time,” referring to the secret program from World War II who was involved in the development of the atomic bomb.
Musk was an important part of Trump’s re-election campaign, while Ramaswamy ran against Trump in the Republican primaries before endorsing him.
The department’s acronym, DOGE, is also a dog meme that inspired Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created as a joke and said to be the first meme coin.
