How Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Government-Slashing Spree Could Backfire
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the perfect partners for a president-elect whose signature phrase before his time in the White House was, “You’re fired.” About 80 percent of Twitter’s employees were laid off or quit after Musk bought the social media platform and renamed it X. Ramaswamy said on a September podcast that if the federal government fired 75 percent of its employees, “not a thing” would change “for the ordinary American, other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it.”
Um, guys? Take a look at this chart of people directly or indirectly working for the federal government as a share of the U.S. population age 16 and older. It’s lower now than when President Reagan was in office.
Yes, there is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. But overstaffing should not be the first thing on the agenda of the Department of Government Efficiency, which Donald Trump has said he will create and appoint Musk and Ramaswamy to lead.
