Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who has been selected by President-elect Donald Trump to co-lead a new and as yet undefined “Department of Government Efficiency” tasked with slashing federal spending, said this weekend that some government agencies could be “deleted outright” under the incoming administration.
In an interview that aired this weekend, Ramaswamy told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network that the proposed reductions could be extensive. “We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated,” he said.
Ramaswamy, who will reportedly run the efficiency effort with tech billionaire Elon Musk, singled out federal contractors “and others who are overbilling the federal government” as potential targets. “I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” he said.
It’s not clear, however, how the efficiency effort, known as DOGE, will function, or what kind of authority it will have to enact changes. And despite talk about eliminating wasteful agencies to slash federal employment levels, The Wall Street Journal points out that most federal employment is related to defense and security – areas that may be difficult to cut for both practical and political reasons. The agency with the highest number of civilian workers is Veterans Affairs, which employs 486,522 people. The much-derided Department of Education, on the other end of the scale, employs just 4,425 people.
The chart below from the Journal shows a breakdown of the roughly 2.3 million civilian employees of the federal government, who make up less than 2% of the overall U.S. workforce and whose annual payroll cost was about $213 billion as of March 2024.
