Voters spoke in the 2024 elections, and what they said was bring prices down and get immigration under control.
Some beneficiaries of the 2024 election heard a different message. “On November 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are running Trump’s government-efficiency commission, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 21. “They deserve to get it.”
Some voters here and there might want sweeping change, but that’s not what a majority of the electorate is looking for. Trump beat incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote by a mere 1.6 percentage points, and his margin in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin was less than that. There was no “coattail” effect in the House of Representatives, which Trump’s Republicans will control with the same narrow margin they have now.
In post-election polls, 41% of voters said inflation was their top voting concern, followed by 35% citing immigration, according to a Harvard CAPS/Harris survey. After that came the economy in general, women’s rights, healthcare, crime, and climate change. The only hint of dissatisfaction with the government was 13% who said the national debt was their top concern. That landed eighth.
Yet Musk and Ramaswamy are set to remake the government in much the same way that Musk tore into Twitter after he bought it in 2022, slashing payroll, charging new user fees, and rebranding it as X. Musk and Ramaswamy will run a new “Dept. of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, that will be outside the government but work with the Trump White House to streamline the federal bureaucracy and zap redundancies.
In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, the two business gurus said they’d target three types of reform to cut $500 billion in annual spending: killing excessive regulation, reducing administrative bloat, and saving taxpayers money. In other remarks, they’ve sounded more draconian. On Nov. 1, Musk, the CEO of Tesla, said spending cuts likely to come from his commission’s work would involve “temporary hardship” for many Americans. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, has called for an across-the-board cut of 75% of federal government workers.
For the DOGE Bros, these are the heady days of half-baked plans and exaggerated ambitions that haven’t yet collided with reality. So the hyperbole may be harmless.
But voters didn’t ask for anything of the sort that Musk and Ramaswamy seem to have in mind. The two bureaucracy bashers are projecting their own desires onto voters and claiming that Trump’s modest win gives them a blank check to do something voters haven’t asked for.
There are three possible outcomes to this assault on Uncle Sam. One is that the efficiency commission proposes deep cuts and painful reforms that never end up happening, as many other commissions have done. Congress holds almost all of the authority for spending and would have to get with the program, which it usually doesn’t.
In a recent analysis, investing firm Evercore estimated that DOGE might be able to identify “hundreds of billions” of dollars in possible spending cuts over a decade, far less than the $500-billion-per-year target. Even then, Congress is likely to increase spending on defense and border control while cutting government revenue through lower taxes. All told, that’s the formula for yet another commission that doesn’t make a dent.
Another possibility is that the Trump administration tries to slash the government without Congress’s approval, which would surely provoke a superstorm of litigation. Some Trump aides say a 1974 law on “impounding” federal funds could let Trump strangle targeted agencies by simply refusing to spend money Congress appropriated to fund them. The result would probably be chaotic until the Supreme Court settled the question of whether Trump actually has such authority. But that could be a de facto diminution of government, at least until then.
Third, Congress could broadly go along with the DOGE commission and grant most of the spending cuts and agency executions it calls for. This seems very unlikely, since members of both political parties exercise power by overseeing the very spending Musk wants to cut. But who knows, Musk might cast a spell that temporarily blocks the self-preservation function on Capitol Hill and allows the unthinkable.
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The bigger question is, how would any of this benefit voters?
One way would be if Musk identifies massive spending cuts, Congress enacts them, and Americans get a refund check from the federal government for all the money it is no longer spending. That’s not in Musk’s Twitter template, however, and the amount of savings required to materially lower taxes — without pushing the gigantic national debt even higher — is mathematically fantastical.
What is in the Twitter template is a cutback in services that alienates users and a degradation of value that costs investors. Applied to the government, this would mean Trump and his Boys Wonder fire thousands of people who answer questions at the Social Security office, process passports, administer farm aid, manage national parks, oversee highway repair, enforce workplace safety, staff air traffic control towers, and take care of veterans. The federal government surely is bloated, like many big organizations. But it also provides valuable services to millions of Americans who may not even realize that their customer service agent is a villainous bureaucrat.
About 3 million people work for the government. If you fired one-third of them, the unemployment rate would jump from 4.1% to 4.7%. Musk says the plan is to resettle these federal exiles in the private sector, but that wouldn’t happen immediately and for some people it wouldn’t happen at all. That would be a million families applying for unemployment insurance and tightening up their spending in the face of sudden career uncertainty.
Coffee shops, dry cleaners, barbershops, and many other small businesses in the vicinity of affected agencies would lose customers, and some would shut down. Many federal agencies are spread around the country, way beyond Washington, D.C., including some in underdeveloped areas that don’t have other big employers. Maybe they could apply for the farm work likely to be available when Trump deports millions of undocumented migrants. This is the “temporary hardship” Musk is talking about.
Do voters want this? Ramaswamy thinks so. “Do we want incremental reform, or do we want revolution?” he asked during his own brief presidential bid, the point being revolution, of course. Then he got Trump’s ear. It remains to be seen if Trump heard the voters who simply want a break on the rent and a cheaper fill-up at the gas station.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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