The bureaucratic hoops Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will have to jump through as the heads of President-elect Donald Trump’s planned Department of Government Efficiency will drive them both “crazy,” predicted CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said on social media when announcing the new entity, nicknamed DOGE, Tuesday.
Trump went on to compare the effort, which is not an official government agency, to the Manhattan Project, which compartmentalized the secret development of the first atomic bomb during World War II.
Trump provided no further details about its creation. Toobin says that will be a colossal mission of its own.
The former prosecutor said Tuesday on “Anderson Cooper 360” that, while Trump can appoint anyone he wants, “there is a very boring and very important law called the Administrative Procedures Act” — which governs how federal agencies are developed.
“And it requires a lot of hoops to be jumped through,” Toobin told Cooper, per Mediaite.
The legal analyst added that “you have to go through all these steps” to eliminate even one small “part” of a government department, let alone “the structure” of the Department of Education or any other federal entity that has existed for decades.
“And like it or not, these two entrepreneurs are gonna have to start learning that and following it,” Toobin continued. “And it’s gonna drive them crazy, and we’ll see how much they actually do. There have been lots of attempts to make the government more efficient.”
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Musk’s gamble to endorse Trump and inject at least $75 million of his own money into the campaign seems to have paid off, as he is set to lead a department that calls to mind the Dogecoin cryptocurrency he promotes publicly and on his social media platform, X (née Twitter).
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The coin’s price reportedly spiked after Trump’s announcement Tuesday.
Ramaswamy, who initially challenged Trump while vying to be the Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election, routinely avoided criticizing him directly on the campaign trail — and then endorsed the now-president-elect.
“SHUT IT DOWN,” Ramaswamy wrote Tuesday on X.
While many conservative acolytes of the trio are hailing Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy on social media for promising to eradicate wasteful government spending, skeptics find the idea of billionaire CEOs being in charge of this effort more than a little unnerving.
“Billionaire crooks working for billionaire crook, to curry favour and avoid future prosecution,” one user wrote in the comments on X after Musk shared Trump’s announcement. “While deregulating their own businesses. Billionaires don’t work for us!”