Trump’s DOGE team will move swiftly to slash Washington bureaucracy

Charged with eliminating government waste, Vivek Ramaswamy says he and Elon Musk will push for cuts to the Pentagon, Health and Education as well as government contractors.

US entrepreneur and former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. Picture: AFP.

One of the hand-picked leaders of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, says the first targets of the incoming administration’s push to massively slash federal spending include the Pentagon, Health and Education as well as government contractors.

Mr Ramaswamy told the Sunday Morning Futures program on Fox News on Sunday (Monday AEDT) that he and Elon Musk – also charged with leading the DOGE – would seek to have Mr Trump take swift executive action to remove the “unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state.”

“It’s going the be fixed through executive action,” he said.

The comments come as the political battle intensifies over the nomination by Mr Trump of key cabinet selections including Matt Gaetz as attorney-general, Pete Hegseth as defence secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr as his top health official and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

The Trump transition team was blindsided in recent days by revelations that Fox News TV host Mr Hegseth had paid a woman who accused him of a 2017 sexual assault in Monterey, California, as part of a 2020 nondisclosure agreement, although he maintains the sexual encounter was consensual.

Doubt also appears to be growing over whether Mr Gaetz can pass the Senate confirmation process after his nomination and subsequent resignation from Congress effectively scuttled a probe by the House Ethics Committee into allegations he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.

Pressure has since been growing for the findings of the probe to be released regardless, with Democratic member of the committee Glenn Ivey telling MSNBC over the weekend that Senators should be fully informed of the report’s contents because of their “constitutional obligations.”

“They’ve got a mandate to provide advice and consent with respect to these kinds of nominations. And there’s no nomination more important that the attorney-general of the United States,” he said.

Anticipation also continues to mount over who the President-elect will select as his treasury secretary, with Mr Musk promoting fellow billionaire and co-chair of the Trump transition team, Howard Lutnick, over hedge fund manager Scott Bessent.

Charged with delivering a blueprint to overhaul the bureaucracy by July 4 2026 in a task likened by Mr Trump to the “Manhattan Project of our time”, Mr Ramaswamy clarified on Sunday morning that immediate steps to slash the bureaucracy could still be taken on a “real time” basis.

Mr Ramaswamy said the US Supreme Court had laid the foundations for Mr Trump to swiftly “downsize the size of that administrative state. And the beauty of all of this is that can be achieved just through executive action – without Congress.”

He said that Americans had not voted for incremental change, but “sweeping change” and flagged the shutdown of entire agencies and mass job cuts across the Washington bureaucracy, as well as relocating entire departments.

“The Pentagon has just failed its seventh consecutive audit,” he said. “So, I think part of this is exposing for the public the extent of that rot and waste … This is about restoring self governance and accountability in America.”

He said quick action through executive action would “lay the groundwork for Congress to have to take meaningful steps in budget reductions for the future.”

“You could take haircuts across the board, and they would be no worse off for it. And it’s not just about cutting costs, but increasing effectiveness, from defence to health care,” he said. “I’m optimistic. It’s why we set an end date on this. Our work is done by July 4 2026 – unlike every other government project … We don’t want this one to last.”

Pressed on whether the Education Department could be shut down, Mr Ramaswamy said that “we expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts among federal contractors and others who are over billing the federal government.”

“I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we are able to move with some of those changes given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us.”

He also argued this was an “historic opportunity” to take action, arguing that Mr Trump had been given “both chambers of Congress” as well as a “six to three conservative majority in the Supreme Court.”

“If we don’t downsize the federal government now, it’s never going to happen,” he said. “We’re not actually going to squander this, But I think part of the key is to move quickly, to move effectively.”