Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President-elect Donald Trump has tasked with running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), laid out their vision in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday.

Musk and Ramaswamy said that the way the government is currently run is “antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision” because it takes the power out of the hands of elected leaders and places it in the hands of bureaucrats.

The department was created to “cut the federal government down to size,” they wrote. “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long.”

They said that the Trump transition team has hired them to lead a lean team of “small-government crusaders” who will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”

They continued:

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.

The department will work with legal experts and use “advanced technology” to determine where cuts can be made immediately that they say will “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”

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They said that DOGE will aim to gut $500 billion in annual federal expenditures every year that are “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

They also advocated for large scale audits of federal contracts that have gone unexamined, which they argued would yield “significant savings” to taxpayers.

Musk and Ramaswamy said that they aim to dissolve the DOGE by July 4, 2026, hoping that they will have fixed many of the country’s spending problems by its 250th birthday.