Elon Musk wants to gut the government like he did at Twitter. But his private sector strategies are going to be tested at DOGE

He is co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which President-elect Donald Trump recently created to reduce government regulation, lay off unnecessary workers, and save money. Musk’s partner is Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotech entrepreneur and candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Their ambition is astonishing. Recently Wall Street Journal In an op-ed, they wrote that they expect “mass staff reductions throughout the federal bureaucracy,” which will be their primary cost-cutting tool. Ramaswamy proposed firing 75% of federal employees.

Musk seems like the perfect man for the job. He’s fired a slew of workers at SpaceX and Tesla, and is the CEO of both companies, but due to his massive terminations, nothing can match his performance at Twitter. When he bought the company in 2022, he began mass layoffs within a week, firing thousands of the company’s 8,000 workers overnight. Some got the news by email. The others were only able to conclude that they had been fired when they were unable to log into the internal computer system the next morning. A few of them were released by accident and were returned. In the following months he spent more. Six months after taking office, Musk told the BBC that he had reduced staff numbers by more than 80%.

It’s hard to know exactly how successful X (as Musk renamed Twitter) will be, since the company is no longer publicly traded, but the signs aren’t promising. Fidelity owns a minority stake in X and reports its estimated value. Based on Fidelity’s October estimates, X has lost 79% of its value since Musk took over.

Will Musk bring Twitter’s rules to America’s largest employer, the federal government? It’s easy to imagine Washington shuddering at the thought. But as other industry leaders have discovered, government differs from the private sector in some strange ways. This is what Musk is up against.

· DOGE can’t achieve that. Musk could have fired his companies’ employees in a heartbeat because he was the CEO (and of Twitter, he is also the majority owner). But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and current president of the center-right American Action Forum, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin “has no power.” “They’re an outside advisory group that’s going to generate ideas. They’re basically a high-level think tank.

· Dismissals are based on regulatory rollbacks. DOGE’s stated action is to identify federal regulations that appear invalid under two Supreme Court decisions, from 2022 and 2024. Then, President Trump will roll back “thousands of these regulations,” Musk and Ramaswamy say in their op-ed. Less regulations mean a lighter workload and fewer employees. But while Trump can “immediately stop implementing these rules,” he must then “begin the process of review and repeal,” which could take a year or more and may not happen at all. Many lists have constituencies that have a voice in what happens. Bottom line, some regulations don’t give in easily.

· Splits, even if successful, won’t save much money. Musk and Ramaswamy stress that cost savings are central to their mission, but labor costs represent a small portion of federal spending. The vast majority of what the government spends goes out the door in the form of benefits – Social Security, veterans benefits, food stamps, and many others. All of these benefits have strong audiences and are very difficult to reduce. Payroll is not where the money is. “If you cut 25% of all federal jobs, you will save roughly 1% of federal spending,” says Brian Riedel, a Washington-based economist who has been a Senate staffer and worked for Republican officeholders. That doesn’t mean he thinks 25% job cuts will happen. “I don’t think it’s possible to work remotely to reduce the federal workforce by 20%, much less than the 75% promised by Vivek Ramaswamy,” he says.

· Federal workers will fight back. About 1 million federal employees belong to unions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, and they are already preparing to take on the Trump administration. Trump said he would impose an employee category called Schedule F, reclassifying career civil servants as political employees, who lack civil service protections and can be quickly fired. Many state unions are trying to protect their members from Schedule F designations by appealing to the federal Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Even if the guilds lost, they might be able to throw sand into the gears.

“The ultimate goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026, which is the expiration date we have set for our project,” Musk and Ramaswamy say. Ostensibly, this is a celebration of DOGE’s work as America celebrates its 250th anniversary^y holiday. In practice, Republican control of Congress should leave six months in case DOGE’s action requires legislation. Musk is accustomed to massive layoffs within days, but he will likely need every moment he has to accomplish a layoff in his lifetime.

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