What Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy could abolish in the name of government efficiency

President-elect Donald Trump has charged Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy with cutting government spending and “making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency.”

Years of comments from both men suggest they could aim to do much more than slim down Washington. They appear poised to make a run at abolishing huge areas of that bureaucracy entirely.

“99 Federal agencies is more than enough,” Musk posted Tuesday night after Trump’s announcement was made official. That suggests a massive culling of the hundreds of existing agencies, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the Education Department already in focus.

Musk later amended his count even lower, overlooking how a government database shows there are 80 agencies that begin with the letter U alone.

Between them, Musk and Ramaswamy have also directly discussed eliminating high-profile areas like the Education Department, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service.

Ramaswamy promised the elimination of at least five larger agencies during his run for president last year. He also discussed cutting 90% of the staff at the Federal Reserve during that campaign.

“This will send shockwaves through the system,” Musk was quoted as saying in Tuesday’s release.

But how deep the new heads of this new government efficiency effort will actually aim to cut — and whether they can actually bring any ideas to fruition as they “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” — remains to be seen.

But they now have president-elect Trump’s formal backing.

A detailed list of cuts

Ramaswamy has perhaps the most fleshed-out agenda from his own time on the campaign trail as a onetime rival to Trump.

During his 2023 run for the White House, he pledged to fire 75% of federal employees and promised to abolish at least five well-known federal agencies — including the Department of Education, the FBI, the ATF, the IRS, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service.

He also had a keen focus on meddling at the Fed. He promised giant cuts and wrote in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that “I intend to make the 2024 presidential race in part a referendum on the proper role of our central bank.”

That monetary policy focus comes as Trump has sent mixed signals for years on whether he would aim to fire or demote Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Powell himself laid down a marker Thursday that he won’t be going anywhere, even if Trump tried.

Musk, for his part, has offered more scattered plans but has acknowledged that his effort would lead to “temporary hardship.” He’s also forged extraordinarily close ties with Trump in recent weeks, including traveling with the president-elect on Wednesday for a first visit to Washington, D.C., since Trump’s victory last week.

The Tesla (TSLA) CEO has pledged to cut $2 trillion out of the $6+ trillion annual budget without specifying exactly how.

The entire US discretionary budget is just $1.7 trillion, meaning Musk would almost surely need to dip into programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to accomplish his goals.

But the disruptive effort has also gained some high-profile fans.

“I think Elon Musk represents wholesale change, and I think we actually need wholesale change,” Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan said at Yahoo Finance’s Invest conference on Tuesday (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management).

“Our financial situation is fixable. It is fixable in a way that is positive for the base that the president-elect has said that he wants to help,” added Rowan, who has also been mentioned as a possible Trump appointee in the years ahead. “But it is not fixable by small amounts of tinkering. It is about wholesale change.”

It is also not immediately clear how the proposed department will operate and whether Congressional Republicans, who control spending by law, will have any interest in playing along with a massive government reorganization.

But Trump, in his recent announcement, did set a deadline for when we might know one way or another.

“Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026,” the president-elect announced Wednesday, calling it “the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.”

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.