Elon Musk, who now runs the government efficiency initiative he calls DOGE, sketched out plans for aggressive cuts to US spending and regulations that include wiping out the US Agency for International Development — and suggested the bond market should thank him for it.
“We’ve just got to do wholesale spring cleaning” of US regulations, Musk said during an X Spaces session after midnight. In one of his biggest planned cuts to date, the billionaire backer of Donald Trump said his group is in the process of trying to shut down USAID, the foreign aid agency codified by Congress.
Musk said he has Trump’s blessing for the move to end USAID as a standalone agency and fold what’s left of it into the State Department. If it turns out the US really needs such an organisation in the future — or any of the regulations he aims to cull — they could simply just be created again.
Musk also said he’d be giving a talk this week with JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon in an effort to convince bond markets that his cost-cutting initiative known as DOGE should instil confidence in US debt.
Concerns over widening deficits and worries about inflationary policies catapulted Treasury yields higher from their September 2024 lows, both into and after the US election. Any signs of deep spending cuts, which would improve the fiscal deficit would be good news for bond bulls betting on yields turning lower.
Musk’s comments came in a nearly hour-long audio conversation on X, formerly Twitter, and marked the first time Musk has spoken publicly at length about DOGE since Trump became US president. He was joined in the freewheeling conversation by Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, as well as former DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy.
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The breadth of Musk’s activity over Trump’s first two weeks suggests that Musk has broadened DOGE’s mandate far beyond the executive order creating it, which simply tasked the group with “modernising Federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity”.
Musk’s DOGE teams spent the weekend gaining access to Treasury payment systems and firing officials at US Agency for International Development. DOGE is short for the Department of Government Efficiency, and the US Doge Service is housed under the executive office of the president.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has also put key allies at the Office of Personnel Management and the Government Services Administration, the agencies that coordinate human resources, real estate and technology for the government.
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Musk, in a nod to the backlash his moves have generated, openly mused about potentially needing courts to back up some of his more controversial cuts. Six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court were nominated by Republican presidents — and three of those were by Trump himself.
Trump said Sunday night that Musk has his confidence — and suggested that he would have reined him in if he had gone too far. Musk, the largest contributor to the effort to elect Trump last year, now has an office in the White House complex and has been a frequent fixture in the Oval Office.
“Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go, but I think he’s doing a great job,” Trump told reporters late Sunday, hours before Musk’s event. “He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.”
