President-elect Donald Trump selected Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, and Vivek Ramaswamy, former presidential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination and founder of Roivant Sciences, as the leaders of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in an announcement released on Nov. 12.
According to the announcement, the DOGE is intended to work as an outside consulting agency, helping the administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies” during his second term.
UB SUNY SA delegate Chirag Ohri said that DOGE could be a great initiative if applied to the right sectors.
“While I do believe it’ll be hard to divest and de-regulate different sectors, some sectors can definitely benefit from this, mainly cryptocurrency,” Ohri, a sophomore finance major said. “They do talk about saving tax-payer money but I don’t want it to come at the cost of beneficial programs such as Planned Parenthood.”
Musk claimed that the DOGE can cut $2 trillion, approximately 30% of the current $6.75 Trillion federal budget at a Trump rally on Oct. 27. In an interview with Tucker Carlson three weeks prior, Musk said that the government can operate with only 99 agencies, approximately 20% of 438 agencies.
Ramaswamy and Musk also outlined a plan to drastically cut federal spending in an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 20, specifically targeting the government's grants towards the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, “international organizations” and “progressive groups” such as Planned Parenthood. On a separate occasion, both had agreed with a post on X to abolish the Department of Education (DOE), which Trump had also repeatedly promised to abolish throughout his election campaign.
Ohri criticized the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the DOE.
“Talking about education, I would like him to leave it untouched to be honest or maybe even increase grants. Divesting from education is never the right option, using tax money to fulfill the basic needs of students wouldn’t result in it getting wasted,” Ohri said.
Another UB SUNY student delegate, Aryan Mudgal, said that it sounded like a good initiative but “way too early” to see the trajectory of how it would affect SUNY.
“So we'll just have to wait, but I hope it is inclusive, aiming to reform the system of education,” Mudgal said.
President of UB College Republicans Michael Xenos called the DOGE a “noble attempt.”
“This is the kind of outside-the-box thinking we can expect from a second Trump term. We need to stop bureaucratic bloat and reduce our federal budget, for the good of the American taxpayer,” Xenos said.
The UB College Democrats did not respond to The Spectrum’s request for comment by the time of publication.
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