Donald Trump, Elon Musk push forward with cuts, as questions mount about their approach

WASHINGTON — On his first day back as president, Donald Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency to dramatically shrink the size of government, and in its first month of operation it has cut the federal workforce by an estimated 200,000 employees.

Known by its acronym, DOGE, and led by billionaire Elon Musk, the agency began sending out teams on Feb. 1 to sift through agencies' staffing and sometimes access sensitive data, and 12 days later, the firing of thousands of probationary employees with no job protection began.

Trump and Musk’s swift freezing of government-funded programs and firing of the people who help run them has won applause among Republicans and condemnation by Democrats — and led to dozens of lawsuits and several judicial temporary restraining orders.

Scholars and commentators say Trump and Musk have taken unprecedentedly quick actions — characteristic of Musk's handling of his tech companies — to assert a more potent White House control over the sprawling federal workforce and a projected $7 trillion in government spending.

Unlike the last major effort to rein in the government — President Bill Clinton’s Reinventing Government, which cut 426,000 employees and saved about $136 billion during his eight years in office — Trump and Musk are pushing ahead so far without involving Congress.

Those experts said they expect Trump is teeing up a showdown in the Supreme Court over whether the president has the authority to control all agencies, independent or not, and determine all federal spending, despite Congress' control of the power of the purse.

Musk, who is serving as an unpaid adviser to Trump, has often said he wants to save $1 trillion in spending, taking aim at firing as many of the 2.3 million federal workers as possible and shutting down many of the government’s departments and agencies.

Trump issued an executive order to turn the U.S. Digital Service into DOGE and gave it until July 4, 2026, to complete its work, though he can change or rescind his order at any time. In a Feb. 11 executive order, Trump required each federal agency head to prepare to "initiate large-scale reductions in force" and set a hire-to-fire ratio of 1:4. He did not set a numerical goal for shedding employees. 

About 75,000 workers took a deferred buyout, which allows them to stop working while still getting paid until the end of September, and 125,000 more or so have been fired as of the end of last week, according to the Office of Personnel Management and news reports.

The buyout offer, which expired Feb. 13, reduced the federal workforce by 3.2%, falling short of its 5% to 10% goal. 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday evening, Argentine President Javier Milei went on stage and handed a chainsaw like the one he wields to illustrate his deep government budget cuts to Musk.

"This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy," Musk said to cheers in the hall as he hoisted it and pretended to start sawing.

Paul C. Light, an expert on governance and professor emeritus at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, could not recall any president who took the same approach as Trump.

"Most of the presidential management initiatives were actually designed to get something done positively. I don't see that here," Light told Newsday in a phone interview.

"We've got a bunch of government officers who are just trying to figure out how to get through the next thing," he said. "I mean, it's kind of like people are just spending their days, near as I can tell, trying to figure out whether they're going to get fired."

He added, "And that is not a good situation."

‘Greatest cutter’

Before the Nov. 5 election last year, Trump and Musk talked about cutting government down to size.

In an Aug. 13 video streaming conversation on X, Musk urged Trump to agree to create a "government efficiency commission" and said he would be happy to help run it.

"I’d love it," said Trump, who complimented Musk for slashing his companies’ workforces — Musk cut 80% of the workers at Twitter after he bought and renamed it X.

Trump, whose signature phrase on his TV show "The Apprentice" was "You’re fired," told Musk, "You’re the greatest cutter."

Musk's and Trump’s approach to shrinking government is similar to how many corporations, especially in the tech industry, streamline operations with layoffs, said University of New Haven professor James Mohs, who spent 35 years working at publicly traded companies.

While many companies try to prepare workers for layoffs, offering help and giving them time to adjust, many tech companies just send out notices and cut access to their company emails and network. 

On Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, fired 3,600 employees. Amazon said it would lay off more employees this year after cutting 27,000 employees in 2022 and 2023. And Salesforce recently announced 1,000 layoffs.

"The theory is, they're looking for economies of scale. They want to improve their margins, and that’s what the government's doing. That's what DOGE is doing," Mohs told Newsday in a phone interview. 

"When companies do it a lot of times, they're cutting out the dead wood, right?" he said. "I've seen that happen numerous times in corporations and I think that’s all he's doing."

Mohs added, "And remember, he and Elon Musk are both businessmen. They're both successful businessmen. Successful businessmen follow the same playbook."

Not corporate

The federal government, however, is not a private business.

Trump and Musk must navigate around Civil Service rules and in many cases unions that offer job protection, while many companies in the private sector without unions have greater flexibility in hiring and firing, and they usually fire for poor job performance. 

That's why they are targeting probationary workers with less than a year of experience who are not protected by those rules.

Trump is pushing much more aggressive firings than he did before.

In his first term, Trump tried to make the federal workforce and agencies comply with his policies of less regulation, greater free enterprise and unrestricted commerce, said University of Georgia professor J. Edward Kellough, who wrote a book on those efforts.

Kellough cited Trump’s attempt late in his first term to create a new Civil Service category called Schedule F for federal employees who could be hired and fired at will. It didn’t go into effect then, but he has resurrected it in his second term.

"It was a pretty radical set of ideas," Kellough told Newsday in a phone interview. "Now, in this term, it's the same kind of thing, except it’s on steroids."

Different route

The Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s sought to cut the size and cost of government, make it work better with updated technology and give it a "customer-friendly" remake, said Elaine Kamarck, the top adviser to Vice President Al Gore, who led the effort.

Trump and Musk might be intending the same outcome but are going about it in a much faster and different way.

DOGE has had missteps, as Musk has acknowledged. It fired 350 National Nuclear Security Administration employees and now is trying to rehire them. It is trying to rehire employees working on the devastating bird flu that it fired. And it claimed $8 billion in savings from one canceled contract cut that turned out to be an $8 million contract.

"They need to be more cautious," Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told NBC News. "There’s an old saying, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ Well, they are measuring once and having to cut twice."

Gore’s team took a much slower and measured approach, said Kamarck, now the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management and a senior fellow at the nonprofit research Brookings Institution.

The project began in March 1993, and recruited seasoned federal workers who spent the next five months reviewing agencies and coming up with 400 recommendations, unveiled at a White House event in October, according to Kamarck. The next year Congress passed a law allowing layoffs.

"In the second or third year, we published a big report and with recommendations on the regulatory system," Kamarck said, "And that's where we ended up cutting 16,000 pages out of the federal regulations."

The team also worked with employee unions about upgrading technology that would reduce the number of employees, which Kamarck said caused some tension that they worked out.

Kamarck faulted Musk for his approach.

"He's coming up with a management structure that works in the tech company and is totally inappropriate for government," Kamarck said.

"When he took over Twitter and cut 80% of the people, remember that Twitter had to close down. It went dark for some days," she said. "Nobody cares. It did not affect anybody's health or welfare or well-being."

But if Social Security payments, Medicare drug payments, the FAA or CDC's tracking of foodborne illnesses go down, she said, "Not only do people care, people die."

Kamarck added, "That is a big, big difference between taking down Twitter and taking down the federal government, and that is the fundamental flaw in their whole approach."