President Donald Trump has given the world’s wealthiest man even more power to reshape the federal government by signing an executive order requiring agencies to cooperate with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and the effort to slash costs.
Trump signed the order as Musk stood over his shoulder in the Oval Office on Tuesday as reporters — and Musk’s young son — looked on. The president quickly turned over control of the question-and-answer session to his wealthy patron.
Asked about critics who’ve called his anti-government efforts a “hostile takeover” of the executive branch, Musk told reporters: “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get.”
He claimed that the purpose of Trump’s administration was to “restore democracy” by eliminating the independence of the professionalized civil service, which he described as “this unelected fourth, unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy.”
Musk also suggested that executive branch agencies have “in a lot of ways, currently, more power than any elected representative” and claimed — without offering any evidence — that federal employees were illegally enriching themselves to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and said his effort is also targeting alleged fraud in federal spending.
“We’re really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present that haven’t been present,” he said.
President Donald Trump speaks as he is joined by Elon Musk, and his son X Ã A-Xii, in the Oval Office. There, Musk talked about the importance of his cost-cutting agency (AFP via Getty Images)
The richest man in the world continued to list off grievances about the federal government’s finances and the size of the federal workforce and suggested that the country would soon go bankrupt without his intervention. He’s repeatedly made the same claim, including during the 2024 presidential campaign when he announced his support for Trump, but in fact the federal government is not actually in danger of going bankrupt.
One example he cited as waste that could lead to federal bankruptcy was the federal government’s retirement system, which works from paper records stored at the Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Operations Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
That facility, which safeguards federal personnel records dating back decades, is housed in a disused limestone mine. Musk complained that the speed at which retirement papers are processed is determined by the speed of an elevator inside the facility and he marveled that there are “1,000 people that work on this.”
As he spoke to reporters, Musk claimed that DOGE’s goal is to “get people to do, to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity [in the civil service] to high productivity roles [in the private sector] and said doing so would “increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there’s a higher standard of living available for everyone.”
A White House fact sheet obtained by The Independent states that the new executive order requires the heads of federal agencies to “coordinate and consult with DOGE to shrink the size of the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions” and directs the Office of Personnel Management, which is already led by Musk allies, to promulgate new rules for federal worker conduct.
It also requires agencies to limit hiring by filling just one position for every four employees who leave federal service and to plan for “large-scale reductions in force” by determining what functions can be eliminated or combined.
Musk has drawn the ire of Democrats for some of his moves. He has already targeted the United States Agency for International Development and the Department of Education for his cuts (REUTERS)
Trump’s order, which will not apply to “national security, public safety, law enforcement, and immigration enforcement” components of the federal government, is the latest effort by the new president and his wealthy patron to downsize the nation’s 2.2 million federal workers.
The president and his “Make America Great Again” movement have long been hostile to the idea of a non-partisan civil service staffed by career experts, who swear an oath to “support and defend” the United States Constitution rather than any particular president.
In private conversations with confidantes, Trump has often blamed civil servants for stymying his first-term agenda and has complained that he can’t fire career employees for being disloyal to him personally.
One of his first acts as president revived an executive order from his first term that reclassifies broad swaths of the civil service in “policy-determining” positions as at-will employees and strips them of the protections they’ve long enjoyed as part of the nonpartisan system first established under the 1883 Pendleton Act.
Since he returned to the White House after being inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States last month, Trump — through members of Musk’s group who have embedded themselves in agencies across the government — has worked to shutter entire agencies deemed to be insufficiently aligned with the right-wing administration’s ideological priorities.
In one instance, they unilaterally shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has long been responsible for distributing billions of dollars worth of humanitarian and medical assistance across the world.
Musk told reporters that while he thought the agency did “some worthy things,” he complained that it was “overall … not very good” because it was “influencing elections” through the American government’s efforts to support independent media and pro-democracy groups in countries governed by authoritarian regimes.
Trump also chimed in to say that USAID was “corrupt” and “incompetent” and griped about a federal judge’s order preventing his administration from laying off the tens of thousands who have worked for the agency.
“We have massive amounts of fraud that we caught. I think we probably caught way over a lot of billions of dollars already in what two weeks … as I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it. And the only way to catch it is to look for it. And if a judge is going to say you’re not allowed to look for it, that’s pretty sad for our country,” he said.
