Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are sending representatives to agencies across the federal government, four people familiar with the matter said, to begin preliminary interviews that will shape the tech executives’ enormous ambitions to tame Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy.
In recent days, aides with the nongovernmental “Department of Government Efficiency” tied to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have spoken with staffers at more than a dozen federal agencies, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
The agencies include the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, the people said.
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At the same time, Musk and Ramaswamy have significantly stepped up hiring for their new entity, with more than 50 staffers already working out of the offices of SpaceX, Musk’s rocket-building company, in downtown Washington, two of the people said. DOGE aims to have a staff of close to 100 people in place by Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, they said.
While much about DOGE remains unclear — including who is paying the salaries of these staffers or exactly how DOGE representatives work with the formal transition team — the agency outreach reflects intensifying efforts by Musk and Ramaswamy to propose what they say will be “drastic” cuts to federal spending and regulations. Even as the scale of their project grows, Musk and Ramaswamy are encountering a slew of obstacles, including reluctance among congressional Republicans to approve deep budget cuts and a skeptical career civil service.
Two government employees said remarks Musk and Ramaswamy have made about the civil service have made them wary of the entire DOGE effort. Longtime civil servants — some who have built their careers learning the intricacies of the federal bureaucracy — are an awkward fit with Silicon Valley’s fast-moving and disruptive culture. Many in Washington regard the tech entrepreneurs as arrogant or naive about the complexity of reining in government.
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