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Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, met over the weekend with President-elect Donald Trump and his choices to slash billions if not trillions of dollars in federal spending—entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Musk- and Ramaswamy-led Department of Government Efficiency is expected to work closely with the new Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget to implement recommendations on fiscal policy. 

Ernst, who visited Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, leads the Senate’s new DOGE Caucus. The Iowa Republican has been a fiscal watchdog since her election in 2014. She publishes the annual “Squeal Awards,” reminiscent of the late Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., whose annual “Wastebook” highlighted examples of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. 

“From billion-dollar boondoggles to welfare for politicians and trillion-dollar slush funds, my decadelong investigations have exposed levels of abuse that are almost too insane to believe,” Ernst said in a public statement. “The tables are finally turning, the knives are out, and waste is on the chopping block.”

“As President Trump, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy prepare to take action,” she added, “the Senate DOGE Caucus is ready to carry out critical oversight in Congress and use our legislative force to fight against the entrenched bureaucracy, trim the fat, and get Washington back to work for Americans.”

Congressional support is evident. In addition to Ernst’s Senate caucus, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has established a subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency to be chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

However, Musk and Ramaswamy argue that much of the cutting can be done through executive action. 

 “The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings,” Musk, owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and the social media platform X, and Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, assert in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Nov. 20. “We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”

The group Citizens Against Government Waste—known for publishing an annual “Congressional Pig Book” about pork barrel spending—grew out of the so-called Grace Commission on cutting government. 

Nearly all of the recommendations in the 1980s from the Grace Commission were implemented by executive action if they could be, saving $100 billion, said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. Among its suggestions were the establishment of a commission on closing military bases and the sale of certain airports. 

“President [Ronald] Reagan spent a lot of time talking about the Grace proposal,” Schatz told The Daily Signal. “He took it seriously and made proposals in his budget.”

There was also a Grace Commission Caucus in Congress, Schatz noted. The Grace Commission operated for a year and a half (from June 1982 to January 1984), the same time frame contemplated for DOGE. The Musk-Ramaswamy effort is set to complete its work July 4, 2026. 

Still, Schatz noted, rolling back government regulations will have to occur under a law called the Administrative Procedures Act. 

“On the regulatory side, executive action can undo the focus on climate and DEI,” Schatz said, referring to liberals’ focus on climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion. “That won’t necessarily save money, but it would make the agencies more mission-focused.”

The DOGE cost-cutting effort has the potential for lasting change in tackling the entrenched Washington bureaucracy, said author and historian Larry Schweikart, a former professor at the University of Dayton who wrote the book “Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and Their War With the Swamp.”

“This can be extremely powerful. Now, it is not a Cabinet-level outfit and some changes would have to be by law,” Schweikart told The Daily Signal in an email Monday. “However, there are a number of tricks or devices they can use.”

These could include buying out the top person in a bureau, then permanently ending the vacant position, he said. 

“Move as many jobs to contractor ‘Schedule F’ as possible. Again, [it] may be fought at some levels,” Schweikart wrote in the email. “Remove as many job locations from D.C.; this will cause shrinkage by attrition.”

Schedule F refers to a reclassification of career federal employees who are involved directly in determining policy that could make it easier to remove poorly performing or overly politicized federal employees. 

“Many people can’t just be fired—they are spoils system/patronage positions,” Schweikart said. “But you can make the working conditions so onerous or boring they quit.”

Executive action to cut government spending likely would prompt legal resistance, said David Ditch, senior analyst for budget policy with The Heritage Foundation. 

“There will be a legal argument that could go all the way to the Supreme Court,” Ditch told The Daily Signal. “Congress does authorize the executive branch to spend billions every year.”

“How much of that does Congress dictate versus how much is discretionary spending is the question,” he said. “If it’s discretionary, it could be a significant amount.”

DOGE is likely to be a centerpiece of the incoming Trump administration, said Ditch, a former analyst for the Senate Budget Committee.

“They will look at programs and subsidies in a way that is less deferential than politicians who will benefit from it,” he told The Daily Signal. “Elon likes to go big and doesn’t tolerate waste. Vivek wants to make his mark in politics.”

“Another aspect is the megaphone effect. With past commissions, most of the people who read the reports were inside the Beltway,” Ditch said. “DOGE is blasted out on X to millions of people, which shapes conversations.”

In 2010, President Barack Obama named President Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, and former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., to co-chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. 

Little came of the Simpson-Bowles commission’s suggestions, but this should be different, Ditch said. 

“The only time in the last 20 years the government swamp paid attention to the national debt was after the tea party election in 2010, which forced them to care,” he said. “The swamp benefits from this and will only pay attention to the fiscal problems when there is political pressure.”