The point of Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE is to cut entitlement programs so Trump can give tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and corporations

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t even taken office and congressional Republicans are already taking cues from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the pair’s new playground, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

GOP lawmakers immediately lined up against the original short-term government funding bill released this week after Musk voiced his opposition. On top of that, a group of extremist Republicans, led by Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Andy Harris, are fighting to ensure that the fresh round of tax cuts Republicans have planned for Musk when Trump’s 2017 tax law expires are paid for with $2.5 trillion in spending cuts on programs Americans rely on chosen by — you guessed it — Musk.

Republicans have made their plan for the new year crystal clear: ram through massive tax giveaways for the ultra-wealthy and corporations, and pay for them by shaking down programs and agencies that working families rely on. And they’re putting unelected and unaccountable oligarchs — Musk and Ramaswamy — in charge of deciding how much pain Americans will have to tolerate so that the rich can get richer.

Contrary to Musk and Ramaswamy’s claims that DOGE will put money back in taxpayers’ pockets, nothing laid out in DOGE’s scattershot plans shows any serious understanding of improving efficacy and efficiency. Rather, it’s just the latest iteration of conservatives’ decades-long crusade to, as Grover Norquist famously said, reduce government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — combined with their perennial obsession to cut Social Security benefits for seniors.

We’ve seen this before. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan spearheaded the Grace Commission to cut federal spending. The committee put together more than 2,500 recommendations but virtually none of them were taken up. This isn’t even the first time Trump himself has tried this scheme. During his first term, he tapped billionaire Carl Icahn to tackle government inefficiencies. Icahn lasted seven months before resigning for allegedly rewriting regulations to benefit his Texas-owned oil refinery. And now, Musk and Ramaswamy are being given free reign to decide what programs they can cut to fund their own tax cuts, all while Musk himself benefits from billions in government subsidies. DOGE is quickly becoming the GOP’s political cover to blow a hole through the budget while tearing down popular safety net programs they’ve crusaded against for decades.

It doesn’t take much more than simple math to realize that DOGE’s empty promise to curb government inefficiencies by cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget is nearly impossible without going after Medicare and Social Security given the way our federal budget is actually allocated.

In fact, while Trump studiously avoided supporting unpopular policies like cutting Social Security during his 2024 campaign, Musk, Ramaswamy, and DOGE’s unofficial think tank, the ultra-conservative Cato Institute, are already planning to “shrink Social Security,” slash benefits, cut the Social Security cost-of-living adjustments that ensure seniors’ benefits keep pace with inflation, raise the retirement age, and more, according to the plans laid out in Cato’s DOGE manifesto.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can agree that there are many tax-funded tools Americans rely on that need improvement. If DOGE truly existed to improve government efficiency and cut wasteful spending, they would of course start by recommending that Trump hold off on another round of costly tax cuts for the wealthy. They would also advocate for a better-funded IRS to continue its efforts to collect billions of dollars from tax cheats and expand the hugely popular Direct File program to help more people file for free. In fact, they could even meet the public where they are and recommend raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy to pay for priorities like education, health care, and Social Security — some of the federal government’s biggest ticket items.

But that’s not the point of DOGE. Instead, if Republicans get their way, we could end up with no veteran’s health care, no Medicare, and no Social Security, while the members of Trump’s billionaire boys club rake in tax handouts paid for by teachers, nurses, and firefighters.

Here’s the good news: Like the commissions of Christmas past, Musk and Ramaswamy are setting themselves up for failure. Americans can see this scam for what it is. Polling shows the commission is already underwater among Americans. They know that once Musk and Ramaswamy’s checks clear, they’re going to turn around and try to tell Americans that we can no longer afford to cover their Medicare. Americans know that we could have the best schools, hospitals, and roads in the world if conservatives weren’t constantly doling out tax giveaways to the ultra-rich and starving our communities of resources, which is why four in five Americans support raising taxes on the rich.

Working families don’t need a pair of ultra-rich tech bros to tell us where their priorities lie. When Musk and Ramaswamy fail to come up with a plan to make life easier and more affordable for working people, they’ll do what ultra-wealthy scammers do best: drop everything and move on to their next grift. Let’s just make sure they don’t leave dangerous products, higher prices, and smaller paychecks in their wake.