How Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Government-Slashing Spree Could Backfire

Opinion|How Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Government-Slashing Spree Could Backfire

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the perfect partners for a president-elect whose signature phrase before his time in the White House was, “You’re fired.” About 80 percent of Twitter’s employees were laid off or quit after Musk bought the social media platform and renamed it X. Ramaswamy said on a September podcast that if the federal government fired 75 percent of its employees, “not a thing” would change “for the ordinary American, other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it.”

Um, guys? Take a look at this chart of people directly or indirectly working for the federal government as a share of the U.S. population age 16 and older. It’s lower now than when President Reagan was in office.

If anything, the problem may more often be understaffing in key positions: The federal government doesn’t have the people it needs to adequately monitor and vet its enormous streams of payments to defense contractors, hospitals and individuals. For example, administrative expenses account for only half a percent of the budget of the Social Security Administration. Trying to squeeze down that half percent by cutting personnel could lead to misspending of the other 99.5 percent of the budget.

I interviewed three Republicans who have spent parts of their careers trying to curb waste, fraud and abuse in government. All three said they applaud the mission of the Department of Government Efficiency, but all three also said that the job requires on-the-ground knowledge and finesse.