Federal officials are already dealing with surrogates from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s nongovernmental body before Donald Trump is sworn in again.

Private Investigation of Federal Departments side steps OIG

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are sending representatives to agencies across the federal government, four people familiar with the matter said, to begin preliminary interviews that will shape the tech executives’ enormous ambitions to tame Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy.

Instead of the OIG auditing these departments DOGE President-elect Trump is using his executive powers has deputized “X” on his chariot riding on his father, Elon Musk, His chariot is flanked by Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, who previously was a former candidate for the presidency. President-elect Trump has a way of convincing former opponents to join his team. (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

In recent days, aides with the nongovernmental DOGE (“Department of Government Efficiency") tied to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have spoken with staffers at more than a dozen federal agencies, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. The agencies include the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, the people said.

DOGE At the same time, Musk and Ramaswamy have significantly stepped up hiring for their new entity, with more than 50 staffers already working out of the offices of SpaceX, Musk’s rocket-building company, in downtown Washington, two of the people said. DOGE aims to have a staff of close to 100 people in place by Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, they said. the eponym “DOGE’ was coined by Musk for a new cryptocurrency several years ago.

While much about DOGE remains unclear — including who is paying the salaries of these staffers or exactly how DOGE representatives work with the formal transition team — the agency outreach reflects intensifying efforts by Musk and Ramaswamy to propose what they say will be “drastic” cuts to federal spending and regulations. Even as the scale of their project grows, Musk and Ramaswamy are encountering a slew of obstacles, including reluctance among congressional Republicans to approve deep budget cuts and a skeptical career civil service. This illuminates the internal dysfunctional aspects of these agencies. Trump threatened to decrease spending and has targeted the bloated payrolls of these federal agencies.

In a potential nod to the myriad challenges facing DOGE, Musk has begun tempering certain promises in his bid to achieve sweeping reform by reinventing the federal bureaucracy, eliminating entire agencies, shrinking the federal workforce, and slashing historic sums from the federal budget. In an interview Wednesday night at CES, the tech trade show in Las Vegas, he said DOGE may fall short of his initial aim to cut $2 trillion in federal spending.

“I think we’ll try for $2 trillion. I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” he said. “But I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting $1 [trillion].”