President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that two of his strongest supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the “Department of Government Effectiveness”.

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will lead the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, cut excessive regulations, cut wasteful spending, and restructure federal agencies. » Trump said. “This will potentially become the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time. »

If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of this department before, that’s because it doesn’t exist. Despite the misleading name – executive departments can only be established by Congress — Trump simply seems to be forming a new presidential advisory commission or a working group to offer advice.

At first glance, this commission may therefore seem completely unserious. Its acronym “DOGE” is an apparent homage to the meme cryptocurrency. that Musk often promotesand the value of the coin increased after Trump made the announcement. It is also somewhat ironic that a commission concerned with government inefficiency and waste needs not one but two co-chairs.

But the project isn’t just an inside joke, it’s also part of Trump’s existing plan to decimate the federal workforce. His campaign called for relocation of civil servants of Washington, D.C., and making significant cuts to public sector jobs – an attempt to dismantle what Trump and his allies call the “deep state,” even though those jobs are often necessary to maintain federal programs – and the “DOGE” shows that he is at least starting to execute this plan.

Trump hasn’t acknowledged that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is new, nor has he really explained what it would look like. Him only offered vague detailsas how the commission would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government, and partner with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to drive large-scale structural reform.” In other words, the commission is unlikely to have regulatory power on its own, but there is no doubt that it can have influence over the new administration and how it determines its budgets.

What Musk and Ramaswamy want and why it’s dangerous

Although it is not yet clear what this commission will look like or how large it will be, there are many reasons to take the threat it poses seriously. During the election campaign, Musk, who served as Trump’s surrogate, promised to find 2 trillion dollars it could be eliminated from the federal government’s $6.75 trillion budget. And Ramaswamy, who ran against Trump in the Republican primaries but later campaigned for him, proposed lay off 75 percent of the federal workforce and abolish agencies like the FBI, IRS and Department of Education.

The scale of these cuts would be catastrophic. In October, Musk himself said his plan to cut the federal budget would cause economic turmoil, collapse markets and “necessarily involve temporary hardship.” Experts also said that the $2 trillion figure Musk put forward is more than just a target: It’s virtually impossible to find that much money to reduce without investing in investments. social programs on the cutting board.

“You can’t get cuts of the magnitude they’ve imposed without gutting the things that people really care about and rely on,” Sharon Parrott, president of the Center, said by email on budgetary and political priorities.

As my colleague Eric Levitz wrote, if Trump doesn’t cut Social Security, Medicare or defense spending, he should cut other government programs by up to 80%:

This would involve cutting all social services for low-income Americans, food inspections, airline security, health insurance subsidies and infrastructure investments, among other things.

The commission, which Trump said will complete its work within two years, is also plagued by conflicts of interest. Musk’s company SpaceX, for example, has more than 10 billion dollars in government contracts, and agencies like NASA are already too dependent. The federal government also I investigated And take legal action against Musk’s companies, and Musk himself has often complained about its companies face too much government oversight. Now, Musk will advise the next president on which agencies he should try to eliminate.

The “Department of Government Effectiveness” is not necessarily a new idea

Politicians are always promising to end government waste, and the civil service is a frequent target. During the Clinton administration, for example, Vice President Al Gore led the National Partnership to Reinvent Governmentan initiative to streamline the federal bureaucracy by eliminating unnecessary jobs and reducing wasteful spending. Although the project was successful in some respects, it also produced poor results. Reduction of federal workforce was not particularly well targetedand as a result, people with the necessary and special skills left, making it harder for the government to work better, as promised.

President Ronald Reagan — who in his inaugural address said“Government is not the solution to our problem; the problem is government” – also promised a massive reduction in the reach of the federal government. He intended to eliminate major government agencies, like the ministries of Education and Energy, and imposed a hiring freeze on the first day of his administration. But Reagan’s plan to shrink the federal government’s footprint failed, and by the time he left office, there were more people employed by the federal government than in its infancy.

Trump’s plan to slash government spending and reduce the federal workforce will likely face similar obstacles. Part of the reason Musk and Ramaswamy might have trouble finding legitimately wasteful spending is that the federal workforce hasn’t grown much. The federal government employs approximately 3 million full-time workers… almost the same as at the end of the 1960s. And although this figure is much higher (around 10 million) if we take into account entrepreneurs, it hasn’t changed much either since the 1980s, mainly ebbs and flows, but without exponential increase.

The newly created commission is particularly unlikely to succeed in finding significant sources of waste — at least nowhere near $2 trillion — because it likely won’t tackle areas of spending that actually need better accounting, like the Pentagon, which has failed its audit six years in a row. But that doesn’t mean the commission won’t recommend any cuts, and the scale Musk and Ramaswamy are hoping for will almost certainly have a negative impact on the economy.

So, even if the commission’s announcement could have enthused some Republicans and coin investorsthey should know that if this commission succeeds, there could be a recession on the other side.