Nolan Finley: Musk hopes to make budget cutting cool

If Donald Trump doesn’t kill Elon Musk before Musk offs Vivek Ramaswamy, together the three best bros have a chance to achieve something every administration promises, but none has delivered: Rid the federal budget of waste, fraud and inefficiency.

President-elect Trump tasked Musk, the X and Tesla chairman and richest man in the world, and Ramaswamy, a bio-tech billionaire and former presidential candidate, to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

It’s not clear whether DOGE will operate inside or outside of government — only Congress can approve a new government department.

Keeping it on the outside in an advisory and advocacy role would protect it from getting sucked into the bureaucratic quicksand and avoid the irony of creating another federal agency in the name of shrinking the size of the government.

Finding squandered dollars will be the easy part. The Pentagon, where much of the spending abuse is housed, has an inspector general who regularly issues reports on $34 screws and $640 toilet seats. And the General Accounting Office has pinpointed $250 billion in taxpayer dollars across the government lost to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement annually.

A truism of the federal budget is that once it goes up, it never comes down. So, the massive deficit outlays for COVID-19 relief have remained in the budget even though the emergency has subsided.

A federal budget that totaled $4.4 trillion in 2019 now stands at $6.5 trillion, and the deficit has doubled to $1.8 trillion from $984 billion.

Every dollar of federal spending has its own constituency. Even the slightest trims are deemed “draconian” and raise dire alarms about grannies being rolled off cliffs and children left to misery.

Countering the spending lobby will take every bit of Musk’s marketing genius and Ramaswamy’s intense focus.

The pair are talking about “gamification,” a technique long deployed by software developers to spur a competitive environment through the use of such things as points and leaderboards.

Musk is already using his social media platform, X, to highlight examples of waste and bloat. Wednesday, he targeted the legion of “climate advisors” who earn six-figure salaries and are deployed throughout the bureaucracy. Included on the list is the niece of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Keeping waste and the deficit constantly in front of taxpayers through social media campaigns and internet memes is designed to create a movement in support of spending cuts and minimize the political impact on those who ultimately will have to vote to put the reductions in place.

It’s a brilliant strategy that affirms the wisdom of bringing experts from outside of government to do the work the bureaucrats have proven incapable of doing.

It comes with a risk. Spending advocates are already trying to undercut Musk’s credibility because his SpaceX and other enterprises benefit from government grants.

The bigger challenge, though, will be keeping the team together. At the moment, there’s no one closer to Trump than Musk. He has been job-shadowing the president-elect since before the election and is even showing up in family photos. If politics hold true to form, that will stir jealousies and make Musk a target of those he is displacing.

There’s also the question of how long two massive egos such as Musk and Ramaswamy can share the spotlight, particularly considering Ramaswamy is the most irritating person in politics.

But if Trump can hold the band together, this could be the best and last shot the nation has for heading off a debt-driven economic catastrophe.

Nolan Finley writes for the Detroit News.