Elon Musk

[Fake Messiah]

Musk's government job and agency are useless, so the only thing he can do is publicly intimidate the government workers he sees as "unfit" to quit their jobs.

Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles

When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.

Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.

Musk and Ramaswamy plan to compile a list of regulations that they believed stemmed from agencies having exceeded their legal authority.

“DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission,” the men wrote.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy said that cutting rules would allow them to cut staff, allowing “mass head-count reductions” across the government.

Yet many of those employees have civil-service protections, meaning they generally cannot be fired without cause, or for their political beliefs. In his first term, Mr. Trump tried to shift thousands of employees into a different category, where they could be fired at will. President Biden rescinded that order, called Schedule F, when he took office.

Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said that many of the ideas mentioned by Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy would be ripe for legal challenges and noted that many of Mr. Trump’s previous efforts to expansively use executive powers had been struck down by courts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/us/po...udget.html