Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — co-leaders of the so-called Department of Government Effectiveness, an advisory group recently announced by Donald Trump — outlined their vision for the initiative in a statement. Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Somehow.

When you peel away the layers of fancy, gauzy talk from techies, their ideas can be boiled down to a single principle: massive cuts to federal programs that, when deployed elsewhere, have caused calamities.

The editorial is light on details. Musk and Ramaswamy claim they will use lawyers and “advanced technology” (they don’t explain what type of technology) to sniff out what they claim are “thousands” of regulations that they say should be removed (they don’t list any). this regulation). Ramaswamy, for the record, has absurdly suggested cutting 75% of the federal workforce in the past (with the dissolution of agencies like the Department of Education and the FBI). In their editorial, Musk and Ramaswamy assert (without including any real evidence) that removing these regulations would justify eliminating many federal jobs, even as they claim their department will help “support” the “transition to the private sector” of laid-off employees.

They also claim that Trump has the unilateral power to block Congress from funding government programs he doesn’t like. It’s a ridiculous, right-wing legal theory that Musk and Ramaswamy predicted will be upheld by the Trump-filled Supreme Court, but on Wednesday’s episode of “All In with Chris Hayes” it rightly prompted House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, of California, to encourage both men to reread the article. I of the Constitution, which provides Power of Congress to act as a coequal branch of government.

To hell with opinion pieces; I think Ramaswamy summed up this group’s goals much better earlier this week, when he openly supported the idea of ​​instituting “Milei cuts, on steroids.”