President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team are drawing up plans for a Department of Government Efficiency, a project Republican and Democratic presidents before him have pursued.

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will run this team. Beyond that, few details have emerged.

Government efficiency commissions created under previous administrations may serve as a blueprint for the Trump administration. But the scope and scale of its proposed cuts to the federal workforce and government spending are far beyond what previous administrations envisioned.

However, experts familiar with previous government efficiency task forces warn that DOGE may run into many of the same challenges as its predecessors when it comes to making its recommendations a reality.

Since Trump’s announcement last week, DOGE’s leaders have pointed to a mix of conventional ideas for streamlined government service and proposals to eliminate or drastically reduce the capacity of federal agencies.

“You’re being taxed. Your money is being wasted. And the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that,” Musk said last month on the campaign trail.

Over the weekend, Musk tweeted about a Government Accountability Office report on 10 “outdated or obsolete” government IT that cost the federal government about $337 million a year to operate.

“The government runs on ancient computers & software. Needs an upgrade!” he wrote.

Musk also tweeted about GAO’s findings that 18 agencies made $247 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2022.

“The actual fraud and waste in government spending is much higher,” he wrote.

While GAO has long reported on the risks of legacy government IT and improper payments, the cost savings from addressing these problems doesn’t get anywhere close to the $2 trillion in federal spending cuts envisioned by Musk and Ramaswamy.

For context, GAO estimates that if agencies were to implement all its outstanding recommendations — some of which have been pending for years — the federal government would save up to $208 billion.

Meanwhile, Ramaswamy has proposed reducing the federal workforce by as much as 75%, based on their Social Security numbers.

“I’m being a little bit glib here, but I think it’s not crazy, at least as a thought experiment. If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in. And if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75% reduction,” he said last month on the Lex Fridman Podcast.

In a recent Fox News interview, Ramaswamy also proposed eliminating telework for federal employees, bringing them back into the office five days a week.

“Most federal employees right now — most Americans don’t recognize this — they don’t even show up to work,” Ramaswamy said. “So, if you tell people you have to affirm that you want a job, that you have to show up to work five days a week, how many of those employees are going to quit right out the gate? That’s a question we should ask.”

The Trump administration would not be the first to launch a government efficiency task force outside the federal government.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan launched the Grace Commission, a privately funded team of more than 160 private-sector executives and more than 2,000 volunteers to “work like tireless bloodhounds to root out government inefficiency and waste of tax dollars.”

The Grace Commission’s final report outlined more than 2,400 recommendations which, if implemented, would save more than $424 billion over three years.

The commission disbanded after issuing its final report, but many of the officials behind the effort launched the nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste.

Most of the Grace Commission’s recommendations required congressional approval. But CAGW President Tom Schatz said agencies cooperated with the task force, and borrowed from GAO agency inspectors general reports for its recommendations.

“A lot of these were management-oriented and efficiency-oriented recommendations. Obviously, there were other proposals to consolidate agencies, or reduce the scope of their powers, but the government is a $7 trillion operation now,” Schatz said.

A Trump administration commission, he added, has low-hanging fruit when it comes to government efficiency.

“It shouldn’t be that hard to sell the idea that the federal government is going to be a better steward of your tax dollars and provide only needed services in an efficient manner without duplicating those services or wasting money,” Schatz said.

The Government Accountability Office produces an annual report of duplication, fragmentation and overlap of programs across the federal government.

In a recent report, GAO found 133 federal programs across seven agencies are in charge of rolling out broadband internet to underserved communities, leading to a “fragmented patchwork of funding.”

“People want to get connected to the internet. Well, you can do that, but you don’t need 133 programs,” Schatz said.

Schatz said that, “over time, it’s not an unreasonable objective” to cut $2 trillion from government spending. But the team behind DOGE has yet to propose a timeline for its cuts.

“This is all about management and mismanagement. But that doesn’t get members of Congress reelected as much as, ‘Look what I’ve done for you with this new program,'” he added.

John Kamensky, an emeritus senior fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government, served as the deputy director of the Clinton administration’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government.

DOGE’s goal to save $2 trillion, he said, is possible through cuts to discretionary spending, but only once you look at a 10-year window and beyond.

“It’s $2 trillion, but over what amount of time? Nobody’s articulated that. If you look expansively at what the $2 trillion could be comprised of, that’s conceivable over 10 years to do something. But it’s not all cuts. It’s going to be reconfigurations, rethinking how you do things,” Kamensky said.

Kamensky said the Clinton administration commission’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government helped save the federal government $110 billion over five years.

“We didn’t start with the target of saving money. That was an expectation, that that would happen, but that wasn’t the purpose,” Kamensky said.

Rather than focus on major agency cuts, the commission, led at the time by Vice President Al Gore, focused on making them run more efficiently.

“Gore said, ‘We don’t want to move boxes,’ reorganizing, which is where the private sector usually starts. He said, ‘We’re going to fix what’s inside the boxes, because moving boxes in government is unbelievably difficult, compared to the private sector,” Kamensky said.

Kamensky said the level of cuts to the federal workforce proposed by Ramaswamy would greatly impact the capacity of agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, the IRS and the Social Security Administration to provide services to the public.

Agencies, at that point, would have to hire contractors to handle the workload.

“You may privatize them, but all that does is shift the cost and payment structures somehow. But you’re not going to be cutting. You’re not going to get rid of them,” Kamensky said.

Under the Clinton administration, the commission also sought to cut 252,000 positions from the federal workforce — about 12% of the federal workforce at the time.

The commission estimated that about a third of federal employees were “overhead” that worked back-office functions, such as human resources, acquisition or federal real estate.

“It wasn’t a target that was just developed arbitrarily. What we were trying to do was reduce administrative overhead,” Kamensky said.

But the job cuts, he added, “didn’t happen on a rational basis.”

“The agencies decided they were going to cut the field staff, which was serving the public, as opposed to cutting their headquarters down, because that’s where the people they knew were,” he said.

Congress, he added, approved cuts in agency personnel before setting aside funds for agencies to streamline back-office functions like HR and procurement.

“The cuts happened in a very odd way, compared to what we thought. So unintended consequences occurred. And there are some people that are bitter to this day over how some of those things were done,” he said.

Much like the Grace Commission, the Clinton administration’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government made recommendations that Congress did not implement.

That includes proposals to merge the Office of Personnel Management with the General Services Administration, and restructure the Federal Aviation Administration as a government corporation like the Postal Service or Amtrak.

“Part of the challenge for the Musk and Ramaswamy folks is to be able to understand a process where they engage stakeholders at all levels … You can fire as many people as you want, those stonewalling the executive brand, but there’s 200 congressional committees and subcommittees, and they’re going to be protective of their jurisdictions. And so you have to bring along the Congress and the agency staff,” Kamensky said.

The commission, however, made some lasting changes. Its recommendations led to the George W. Bush administration launching what’s known today as the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey in 2002.

It recommended designating agency deputy secretaries as chief operating officers, which still meet together as part of the Presidential Management Council.

The commission also gave rise to USA.gov, a one-stop shop that the public uses to look up government benefits and services online.

In addition to building a team of federal government insiders, Gore also gathered feedback from private-sector leaders and CEOs who led major reforms at their companies.

“We had input from a lot of places, but it was the career staff that came in that were passionate about fixing their agencies and the government that they were working on that made a difference,” Kamensky said.

The commission also received about 50,000 letters from the public — and some federal employees.

“Some of those things actually turned into recommendations, what we put into the report,” Kamensky said.  “I was just amazed at people who would write in and say, ‘You can cut my job. It’s not my job, it is not helping the public.'”

“The implicit sense in the reinventing government is that government could be trusted. That meant that you could use more transparency and delegate and empower employees to get things done. If you don’t trust the employees, then you place more control, controls, and more constraints on them, and that’s a different dynamic. You have to deal with the potential consequences, good or bad, of the implicit values that you bring to the game,” he added.

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