Billionaire Elon Musk has been tasked with leading incoming President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

In a statement on social media, the US president-elect said Musk – along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy – would “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.

It is a role that the tech entrepreneur has arguably prepared for through his business leadership, and one he has spent months arguing for.

But it is also one that is expected to garner him influence over government policy – and the regulatory environment his enterprises exist in.

Musk told a Trump rally in October that he believed the US government’s budget could be reduced by “at least” $2tn from around $6.5tn. He has also frequently suggested reducing the number of government employees. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, has proposed scrapping several federal departments, including the Department of Education, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI.

From Twitter to pared-down X

The way Musk has run his own firms may hint at what Americans can expect when he begins attempting to slash government waste. In October 2022, Musk took over social media platform Twitter – which he rebranded as X – in a $44bn (£38.1bn) deal.

He said he had decided to buy the site so he could remove its policies of moderating content and banning users who had been deemed to have violated its rules on hate speech and disinformation.

Among the users he reinstated was Trump, who had been banned following the Capitol riot in January 2021 after continuing to claim the 2020 election had been rigged against him.

Musk’s takeover saw radical changes to the company.

He reduced X’s workforce from around 8,000 to 1,500. In April 2023, he told the BBC that his reasoning for doing so was that “if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job”.

(via BBC)