kawbet Mr. Musk Goes to Washington — With a $2 Trillion Agenda
Updated:2024-12-11 03:17 Views:72
It’s official: President-elect Donald Trump is setting up a Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and the financier Vivek Ramaswamy to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy.”
The move appears to give Musk a perch to make drastic cuts to government spending, and raises concerns about giving him so much sway when many of his businesses hold federal contracts. But there are lots of other questions — including how much power the commission would actually have.
“This will send shockwaves through the system,” Trump said in a statement announcing the initiative, calling it a potential modern-day Manhattan Project. The president-elect’s description of its goals — “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies” — mirrors Musk’s publicly stated plans, which include cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (He hasn’t clarified how he’d get there.)
The tech mogul celebrated the news on X by reposting scores of memes and declaring that “either we get government efficient or America goes bankrupt.”
It’s a reminder of the huge influence Musk carries with Trump, earned after he spent millions to re-elect the Republican and turned his X account into a campaign megaphone. Since Trump won last week, the two have huddled together at Mar-a-Lago, where, Axios reports, Musk has sat in on meetings to select cabinet members and joined a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The project even adopts Musk’s name for such an initiative, whose acronym alludes to the dog-themed cryptocurrency he has promoted. Coincidentally, Dogecoin is up 147 percent since Election Day, outpacing other digital tokens over that period.
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