Trump Taps Musk, Ramaswamy To Lead New Department of Government Efficiency
President-elect Donald Trump has created a new federal department that will work to make the government leaner, naming tech mogul Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead it.
D.O.G.E., which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, an appropriately named new agency proposed by Elon Musk, will take the lead in an ambitious effort to transform federal bureaucracy and root out frivolous spending from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. The announcement on Tuesday evening was among the most concrete actions to date for Trump's so-called "Save America" agenda for his second term.
"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," Trump said in an X news statement.
Musk soon hopped onto X to vow unprecedented transparency in the agency's operations. "All actions will be posted online," he tweeted, promising the agency would maintain a "leaderboard" of the worst instances of government waste. "This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining," Musk joked.
Trump’s statement has set an ambitious deadline of July 4, 2026, symbolically chosen to fall on the 250th anniversary of America's independence, to complete the department’s goals.
The news produced an unexpected ripple in cryptocurrency markets as Dogecoin, the meme-inspired cryptocurrency that Musk is often associated with, surged 6%. Trading at $0.3569, off from Tuesday’s $0.43 high, Dogecoin is still up 112% over the past week. Another related meme coin, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), gained 78% following the announcement.
