Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy released a plan of action on Wednesday to cripple the administrative state, increase efficiency, and save taxpayer money.
The roadmap embellishes President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp” or destroy the “deep state,” as he characterizes it.
The crux of the plan will run through a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to displace the power of the federal bureaucracy and return it to the “people we elect run the government,” Musk and Ramaswamy outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
DOGE will advise the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings, according to Musk and Ramaswamy. The OMB is a significant department that oversees the implementation of a president’s vision across the Executive Branch, and through it, Trump has the power to ax agency funding that will likely try to operate outside the scope of his agenda.
“Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure,” Musk and Ramaswamy explained:
In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.
DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.
When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.
The term “deep state” or “administrative state” describes the phenomenon of unaccountable and unelected administrative agencies, including the national security apparatus, exercising power to create and enforce their own rules and agenda. The administrative state uses its power to essentially usurp the separation of powers between the three branches of government by creating a so-called fourth branch of government not formed by the Constitution.
More on the administrative state is here.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
