ToplineBillionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—co-heads of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (or “DOGE”)—say they want to slash federal spending by $2 trillion, singling out a handful of federal agencies for what’s likely to be a difficult gambit,

DOGE could be a mechanism for a Musk shadow presidency, a nonsense job designed to keep Musk busy without giving him real power, or a curious mix of the two. In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting “thousands” of federal regulations and determining the “minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.