Department of Government Efficiency Looks to Cut Wasteful Federal Spending With “Historic Opportunity”

President-elect Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead. The goal of this department is to reduce wasteful government spending and simplify the language of regulations. Musk has promised transparency and weekly updates regarding any proposed cuts to government spending.

Senator Rand Paul, who appeared on The HighWire in March, releases a “Festivus” report each year to detail some of the more interesting cases of wasteful spending within the federal government. Paul’s Festivus report from last year detailed billions of dollars in wasteful federal spending, including improper payments and NIH-funded research studies. The NIH studied Russian cats on a treadmill, “meth-head monkeys,” and gambling monkeys. A $33 million contract is in place for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “Monkey Island” to care for the monkeys before sending them to research facilities. The colony began in the 1970s, and pharmaceutical companies have paid millions to maintain it.

In addition to wasteful spending, a large amount of money is unaccounted for. The Pentagon failed its seventh straight audit to which Musk replied, “Sounds like a job for DOGE.” The DOGE X page shared a graph detailing the number of words in the United States tax code over time. There were fewer than 1.5 million words in 1955, which has steadily increased over nearly 70 years to exceed 16 million words. DOGE intends to simplify the tax code to help reduce the amount of time Americans spend preparing tax filings each year.

Ramaswamy said “Nature-made problems are often hard to solve, but the bloated federal bureaucracy is a man-made problem. That means there is definitely a man-made solution. We call it DOGE.” In another post Ramaswamy said that DOGE will not exist in perpetuity as government agencies often do. He said, “DOGE will dissolve on July 4, 2026 after we’ve downsized the government. It’ll be our birthday gift to America on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.”

The White Coat Waste Project (WCWP) is a non-profit that has conducted investigations into wasteful government spending by the NIH, including studies concerning animal welfare implications. WCWP was responsible for uncovering “Beagle Gate” which was approved by Dr. Fauci’s NIAID with a $424,000 grant. WCWP said, “Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive. They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies.”

Last year, The HighWire interviewed Justin Goodman of the WCWP regarding gain-of-function bat studies at Colorado State University. Goodman said these studies are only useful for bio-weapons research, and it’s concerning because American tax dollars also funded coronavirus bat research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where patient zero was infected with COVID-19. The lab-leak hypothesis was once considered a conspiracy theory, but now is the prevailing theory for intelligence agencies.

WCWP called on Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump to save billions of tax dollars and millions of animals by stopping this government-funded research. The NIH is responsible for this research and has over $45 billion in funding every fiscal year. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been anominated as Secretary of HHS, which is the agency that oversees the NIH. Kennedy has expressed his intent to reform the NIH along with the other health-related agencies.

WCWP listed a few notable animal testing projects and suggested the funding be cut by DOGE.

“$2M for dog testing labs in China, $1.5M to spin kittens in motion sickness tests, $10M for constipation & erectile dysfunction tests on cats, and EPA tests forcing mice to inhale gunsmoke.” In another post, they added, “DOD wasted $10M to shove marbles up cats’ butts & electroshock them for constipation experiments. DOD squandered $1M to poison & kill 40 puppies in unnecessary drug tests.”

Senator Paul chimed in on X with another example of wasteful spending for DOGE to evaluate and cut. Senator Paul’s post said, “The NIH spent over $3 million to watch hamsters fight on steroids.”

In an interview with Fox News, Ramaswamy described how the Trump White House can use executive orders to cut a large amount of wasteful spending because the unelected bureaucratic state created it.

“First is we wanna go in right through executive action to the failures of the executive branch that need to be addressed,” Ramaswamy said. “The dirty little secret is the people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action. It’s gonna be fixed through executive action.”

Ramaswamy referred to the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned the Chevron Doctrine. “Over half a trillion dollars that is spent every year right now was not even authorized by Congress in the first place,” Ramaswamy said. “Part of this is exposing to the public the extent of that rot and waste.”

The Chevron Doctrine was the precedent for about 40 years and allowed federal agencies to interpret the laws passed by Congress. Now that the precedent has been overturned, Ramaswamy and DOGE can undo the decisions federal agencies have made over the last four decades with the protection of the Chevron Doctrine.

Ramaswamy said this administration has a historic opportunity to cut the bloat from the federal bureaucracy with President Trump, a Republican House and Senate, and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He said people will be surprised at the speed they are able to move to cut costs from the executive branch without approval from Congress.

“In the early months, score quick wins with executive action,” Ramaswamy said. “Show what can be done then and then I think we will lay the groundwork for Congress to have to take meaningful steps for budget reductions for the future. A lot of these discussions are theoretical. Let’s start with the fact that there’s massive waste, fraud, and abuse right now. Federal contractors are really exploiting the federal government. It’s not just about cutting costs, but increasing effectiveness from defense to health care.”