Vulnerable Programs for Musk and Ramaswamy's 'Chainsaw' Commission on Federal Spending

As President-elect Donald Trump officially moves into the White House come January 2025, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will also become the co-chairs for the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), promising to bring "a chainsaw" into government spending, threatening dozens of programs tens of millions of Americans rely on on a daily basis.

The leaders of the new Department wrote in a Wednesday opinion piece that the commission would target federal spending that's "unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended."

"With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government," the two wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail."

The DOGE X account, which is also owned by Musk, reposted a Congressional Budget Office report, confirming that the commission would aim to cut funding for a range of programs with lapsed funding authorization.

The CBO report included 491 such programs totaling about $516 billion. Most of that money goes to two dozen big-ticket items, including medical care for veterans, housing-assistance vouchers for low-income renters, college Pell Grants, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI and NASA's major initiatives.

The 10 largest programs described in the CBO report, which will be targets for DOGE, make up about $380 billion in appropriations. Other programs highlighted by Ramaswamy and Musk in their op-ed involve smaller sums, such as the $525 million in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $286 million for grants to organizations such as Planned Parenthood, according to Business Insider.

Veteran's health care, the largest program funded by Congress, takes the spotlight in the ambitious plan, with a budget of $119.1 billion. Particularly, a 1996 law will be singled out by DOGE, as it sets eligibility requirements for military veterans to receive hospital, medical and nursing home care and authorized spending for those services and patient enrollment.

That law has not been renewed, but Congress regularly allocates additional Deportment of Veterans Affairs funding and allows benefits to increase automatically based on inflation. Veterans Affairs provides medical care to more than 9.1 million enrolled veterans, according to the Washington Post.

Education spending will likely also be cut

For instance, the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act delegated power to state and local education officials to set primary and secondary education achievement standards. It gives billions of dollars in federal grant money to state and local education officials to fund schools and school districts. Those standards are still used by the Education Department, even though the legislation has not been reauthorized.

The two entrepreneurs are also preparing for layoffs across the government. They wrote in their op-ed that they would "identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions," leading to "mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy."

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said such cutbacks would harm services for Americans who rely on the federal government, and he suggested that Musk and Ramaswamy were in over their heads.

"I don't think they're even remotely qualified to perform those duties," he said. "That's my main concern."

It remains unclear how they will go about slashing these initiatives, and experts question how seriously the two billionaires are taking their new roles.

"It is obviously important for the government to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. There's real bipartisan areas where people agree there's stuff to be done. But what Elon and Vivek and Trump are going for is not that," said Bobby Kogan, an analyst at the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. "They don't even get the basics right. They get the size of the budget wrong. They named it after a meme. In no way are they actually taking this seriously."

But despite concerns, the two billionaires remain confident, calling the DOGE commission the next Manhattan Project.

"There's a new sheriff in town. Donald Trump's the president. He has mandated us for radical, drastic reform of his federal bureaucracy with the learnings of that first term," Ramaswamy said on Fox News. "And look, Elon and I— Elon is solving major problems in physics. I came from the world of biology. What we're solving here now is not a natural problem. This is a man-made problem, and when you have a man-made problem, you better darn well have a man-made solution. That's what we're bringing to the table."