Trump’s Plans for Government Efficiency Keep Getting More Extreme

Donald Trump has sweeping plans for his second term, and they include slashing and gutting large parts of the executive branch.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Trump’s nominated co-chair for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy outlined the massive agenda, revealing that the plan is akin to—or possibly more extreme than—the road map offered by Project 2025. Ramaswamy proposed that several government agencies under his helm would be “deleted outright.”

“Are you expecting to close down entire agencies? Like, President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for example. Are you going to be closing down departments?” Bartiromo asked.

“We expect mass reductions,” said Ramaswamy. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions enforced in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expected massive cuts of our federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.”

And Ramaswamy believes that he and his fellow departmental co-chair, world’s richest man Elon Musk, can expedite those changes by leaning on the highest rungs of the third branch of government: the Supreme Court.

“I think people will be surprised by how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” Ramaswamy told Fox.

From the Trump administration’s perspective, the executive branch can overstep Congress entirely to swiftly remove agencies such as the Department of Education since they were first enacted by executive action.

“It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action,” Ramaswamy said. “It’s going to be fixed through executive action.”

“Think about the Supreme Court’s environment,” he continued. “Over the last several years, they’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state.”

After that, DOGE (the agency) would begin examining cuts to the budget. Reminder: Musk promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, which constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending, a move that would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.

“And the beauty of all of this is that [it] can be achieved just through executive action without Congress,” Ramaswamy added. “Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one.”

Donald Trump has his eye on yet another unqualified lightweight to lead a key agency, as the president-elect reportedly is considering loyalist Kash Patel to head the FBI. 

CNN reported Friday that Trump’s right-wing allies are trying to convince him to fire Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed in 2017 after firing James Comey for allegedly mishandling the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. 

During his presidential campaign, the president-elect expressed his displeasure at Wray, who drew his ire after Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was searched in 2022 due to alleged mishandling of classified documents. FBI directors are supposed to serve a single 10-year term, but Patel’s appointment would make him the third FBI director in seven years. 

Patel is a vehement defender of Trump, showing up regularly on Fox News, at conservative events, and even at Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. In the waning days of his first term, Trump pushed to appoint Patel deputy director of the CIA or FBI but backed down only after receiving pushback from CIA Director Gina Haspel and Attorney General Bill Barr. 

“Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr would later write in his memoir. Or, as CNN put it, “Even among Trump loyalists, Patel is widely viewed as a controversial figure and relentless self-promoter whose value largely derives from a shared disdain for the so-called deep state.”

Patel has said he wants to go after government employees who leak information to the press, as well as journalists themselves. On Steve Bannon’s podcast in December, he said that he and other Trump loyalists “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. 

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said to Bannon. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.” 

If Trump installs Patel at the FBI, it would certainly further Trump and his MAGA allies’ goal of purging the federal workforce of disloyal employees. It also would raise eyebrows for the next FBI director to have three years working in the Department of Justice as his only law enforcement experience. But Patel has demonstrated loyalty to Trump, which might be enough to win over Republicans in Congress.  

House Republicans are trying to push through a bill that would give President-elect Donald Trump powers as president to designate nonprofit organizations as “terrorist-supporting,” even after it was seemingly defeated earlier this week.

The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act would allow the secretary of the treasury the ability to revoke any nonprofit organization’s tax-exempt status by branding it with a terrorism label. Earlier this week, the bill failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the House to advance to the Senate.  

But on Monday, the House Rules Committee plans to hold a hearing that could set up a new vote on the bill, which initially had the support of all but one Republican and 52 Democrats. With the GOP only holding a seven-seat majority in the chamber, they would need the support of more Democrats to advance the bill, which was introduced to combat protests against Israel’s war on Gaza.  

Under any circumstances, the bill would threaten First Amendment rights to free speech, but after Trump’s election last week, there are now fears that the president-elect could use these new powers to crack down on his enemies with little recourse. In addition to activist groups, many universities and news outlets are nonprofit organizations.

After the bill’s initial failure on Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union celebrated the rejection of “new broad and easily abused powers.”  

“The freedom to dissent without fear of government retribution is a vital part of any well-functioning democracy, and now is not the time to grant the executive branch new powers to investigate and functionally shut down and silence its critics,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, in a statement.

Now the bill could be given a retooling and sent up for a vote again, giving a president who has already threatened to use the military against his critics even more sweeping powers. The question is if Democrats will recognize the bill as granting dangerous powers to the presidency or see it as a chance to clamp down on protesters they have tried to ignore at their peril for the past year.  

MAGA has a new conspiracy theory: Pennsylvania Democrats are trying to steal the Senate election because of how they’re counting provisional ballots.

The Senate race is headed to a recount after an incredibly narrow margin of difference between the top two candidates. Last week, former Republican hedge fund manager Dave McCormick was announced the winner of Pennsylvania’s Senate race with 48.9 percent of the vote, at 99 percent reporting. His opponent, incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey, lost with 48.5 percent.

The two sat at a difference of only 29,000 votes Wednesday, and statewide, officials have estimated that nearly 80,000 votes remained outstanding as of Thursday, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Casey, who has not yet conceded his seat, has remained hopeful that buried in that remaining 2 percent of the states’ total ballots are enough votes to make up the difference. And Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state has already declared the initial results necessitate a recount.

The battle for the remaining votes has ignited long-standing issues between Republicans and Democrats in the state over what ballots are able to be counted. Democrats are pushing to count a number of contested provisional ballots that are missing signatures and privacy envelopes, and election boards across the state are also pushing to count a number of undated ballots.

Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia cast a vote Thursday to count certain deficient provisional ballots that were missing one of two required signatures and had previously been barred by court order.

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Marseglia.

“People violate laws any time they want,” she continued. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

Technocrat pest Elon Musk shared a video of Marseglia on X, claiming, “They are openly trying to count illegal ballots in Pennsylvania!”

McCormick and his GOP allies went to court on Thursday to challenge the decisions of county commissioners in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, and Centre counties to include undated mail ballots in their tallies.

Republicans don’t have much hope for ex-Representative Matt Gaetz’s odds of getting into the presidential Cabinet.

The remarkably unpopular Florida politico was nominated by Donald Trump to become the country’s attorney general on Wednesday, a decision that would effectively hand the keys to the Justice Department to a man facing sex trafficking allegations. But before that happens, Gaetz has to be confirmed by the Senate—and that seems increasingly unlikely, according to members of the upper chamber.

Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch. But Gaetz faces immense opposition from inside the party, reported The Wall Street Journal, with far more than three votes planning to oppose the MAGA bro’s nomination. Estimates predict that those against Gaetz range from 12 Republican “no” votes to upward of 30.

“It won’t even be close,” one source told the Journal.

Few conservatives were willing to point out the underlying reasons behind Gaetz’s unlikely candidacy, but they appeared to understand the 42-year-old wouldn’t hold up during the grueling confirmation process.

“It’s simply that Matt Gaetz has a very long, steep hill to get across the finish line,” North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer told the Journal. “And it will require the spending of a lot of capital, and you just have to ask: if you could get him across the finish line, was it worth the cost?”

Another unidentified source familiar with the conversations happening among Republicans over the process told the publication that “people are pissed.”

Trump ally Senator Markwayne Mullin acknowledged that actually getting Gaetz—who up until this week was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct with a minor—into the Cabinet would be “very difficult,” suggesting to the Journal that the vigorous vetting process might force Gaetz into a situation where he has to withdraw.

“Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told the Journal.

Meanwhile, the soon-to-be upper chamber majority appears unwilling to concede any of its power to the executive branch, pushing back on Trump’s demand that the body expedite the nomination process via recess appointments.

Elon Musk is starting to seriously annoy some in Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Musk has been hanging around Mar-a-Lago ever since his million-dollar gamble to help Trump win the presidential election paid off last week. The billionaire technocrat seems to have no intention of taking a back seat in Trump’s presidency, and it’s starting to piss off those in the president’s ranks, according to two people familiar with the Trump team’s transition who spoke with NBC News earlier this week.

“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one of the two people told NBC.

“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one,” they added.

The second person said that Musk had been overstepping his bounds, and that Musk has an “opinion on and about everything.”

“He wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t),” the source told NBC.

Musk has been pretty busy since hitching his space-age wagon to the MAGA movement. Musk met with Iran’s U.N. ambassador on Monday, reportedly hoping to broker some kind of peace negotiation on behalf of the United States. Last week, Musk hopped on Trump’s calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “Co-presidents” doesn’t sound too far off.

The second person suggested that Musk was hurting his chances of sticking around by not keeping a low profile, as the former president hates sharing the spotlight. Earlier this week, Trump cracked a joke at Musk’s expense during a meeting with Republican lawmakers, a reminder to everyone that Musk serves at his leisure, not the other way around.

The second person also speculated that Musk might not be as committed to Trump’s agenda as he presents.

This week, Trump tapped Musk to head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental body that will push substantial cuts in regulations, spending, and personnel. While Trump has suggested that Musk’s role will be merely advisory, the high-level appointment has signaled that Trump’s White House is open for business to anyone who helps him politically and financially—after all, Musk transformed an essential information environment into a propaganda machine, with the sole purpose of having Trump reelected.

U.S. ambassador to Japan and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is floating the idea of running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Axios reports that Emanuel, who also served in Congress from 2003 to 2009 and worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, is considering the move after the Democrats’ losses in the 2024 election. The party lost control of the Senate as well as the presidency—and Republicans maintained a narrow majority in the House—leaving open questions about its future direction.

Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a friend of Emanuel’s, said on his podcast Hacks On Tap earlier this week that he would support the ambassador if he ran for the post.

“If they said, ‘Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?’ I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” Axelrod said.

Since then, other Democrats have told Emanuel he should run, according to Axios. But Emanuel is likely to face opposition from progressives, especially due to his actions as mayor of Chicago. Emanuel’s handling of police violence as well as his record with the city’s public schools earned him a lot of criticism, and the Chicago Teachers Union is still mad at him. ​​

While serving as White House chief of staff under President Obama, Emanuel also clashed with then–DNC chair Howard Dean, who was arguably the most successful party chair in the twenty-first century, with his “50 State Strategy.” Dean said in 2014 that he and Emanuel “obviously have a difference of opinion about how you get people elected.”

This would seem to indicate that Emanuel would be taking a different approach than Dean at a time when Democrats need a plan to take back Congress as well as recover at the state level. Emanuel also has a reputation for angrily going on profanity-laden tirades, which won’t win him friends in a position where one has to be on good terms with Democrats across the country. The fact that Emanuel has been disconnected from local and state politics for years also seems unlikely to help. Democrats are currently expected to tap someone with expertise at the grassroots level and an understanding of how Democrats are winning elections now—two things Emanuel sorely lacks.

Donald Trump’s controversial picks for his upcoming Cabinet have rattled right past the American public and on to damaging Wall Street.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to tap vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year.

Novavax and BioNTech dropped by more than 7 percent, with “almost all of the losses coming after news broke of the selection,” reported Forbes. Moderna saw shares close at $39.77, knocking the stock to its lowest point this year. Pfizer, meanwhile, escaped the day with relatively minor losses, with stocks dropping by 2.6 percent to $26.02.

The pharmaceutical industry hedged its bets in the last election cycle, donating considerable sums of money to both parties. But the historically conservative-leaning sector did, ultimately, give more to Republican candidates—with its affiliated PACs handing approximately $1.7 million more to Republicans across the 2024 election, amounting to $8.3 million in total to the conservative party, according to data collected by OpenSecrets.

But that’s not the only impact that Trump’s policies are having on the stock market. Now that the initial rush surrounding Trump’s pro–big business agenda is quieting down, investors are waking up to the staggering costs of some of his plans. For the second day in a row, the S&P 500 dropped, with tech stocks at the forefront of the decline, according to Bloomberg.

“[Trump’s plans] will come at the expense of potentially larger budget deficits, potentially larger debt and there is also the inflation dimension,” Charles-Henry Monchau, chief investment officer at Banque Syz & Co, told the business publication. “There’s been a realization that there is a price to pay for this.”

Trump has floated several tariff ideas—including one impossibly high hike on imported goods of between 200 and 2,000 percent—that experts believe would drastically spike inflation. Businesses across the country have balked at his numbers, arguing that it will be Americans, not foreign countries, who pay the price. Readying themselves for a potential second Trump administration, companies whose business models rely on foreign suppliers, from the auto industry to some of the nation’s most popular clothing lines, are planning to introduce price hikes on their products.

Trump has also proposed a more modest 20–60 plan, in which a potential second Trump administration would impose a 20 percent worldwide tariff alongside a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But even that plan would prove devastating for the economy, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that it would lower household incomes by an average of $3,000 in 2025.

Donald Trump has nominated his attorney D. John Sauer, whom you may remember as the lawyer who argued that the president should be able to kill his political rivals with impunity, to be the country’s next solicitor general.

Earlier this year, Sauer helped Trump win his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, which undermined other federal legal battles against Trump, like the time he tried to overturn the government after losing the 2020 election. Now Sauer will oversee all federal lawsuits.

In a statement Thursday, Trump lauded Sauer as the “lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA movement.”

While representing Trump, Sauer argued that if the president ordered an assassination on his political enemies, he could not be indicted unless he had first been impeached.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor drilled him about immunity in the case of assassinating political rivals, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical but we can see that would well be an official act.” When she asked if the same rule existed if the president executed people for “personal gain,” Sauer said that immunity still stood.

Ultimately, the court decided that the president had immunity for official acts.

Unlike many of Trump’s other picks, Sauer does have some experience qualifying him for the position. Sauer previously served as the solicitor general of Missouri from 2016 to 2023, under pro-Trump Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both election deniers.

After the 2020 general election, Sauer filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the presidential election in several swing states over alleged mail-in voting fraud.

Sauer left the Missouri attorney general’s office in 2023 to serve as special assistant attorney general for the Louisiana Department of Justice, where he assisted them in launching a lawsuit against members of the Biden administration, aiming to prevent government officials from contacting social media platforms over First Amendment issues.

Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is drawing opposition from former Vice President Mike Pence over Kennedy’s remarks on abortion. 

In a statement, Pence said Kennedy “would be the most pro-abortion Republican appointed secretary of HHS in modern history.” 

“On behalf of tens of millions of pro-life Americans, I respectfully urge Senate Republicans to reject this nomination and give the American people a leader who will respect the sanctity of life as secretary of Health and Human Services,” Pence’s statement said. 

Trump’s choice of Kennedy has drawn alarm from health care professionals, who see his history of opposing vaccination as a threat to public health. Kennedy has also pledged to root out “corruption” in U.S. health agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, and has floated the idea of removing fluoride from the nation’s public water supply. 

Kennedy’s views on abortion, though, have drawn criticism not only from anti-abortion stalwarts like Pence but also from abortion rights supporters, who point to Kennedy’s comments earlier this year vaguely supporting limits on abortion “after a certain point.” Pence’s comments suggest there could be opposition to Kennedy from the former vice president’s fellow Christian conservatives in Congress. 

Pence, who served in the House from 2001 to 2013, had a falling out with Trump in 2021 after certifying the 2020 presidential election results despite Trump’s supporters attempting to violently storm the Capitol. The rioters at the time even set up a noose and gallows outside the building while chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” with Trump at the time reportedly thinking that Pence deserved the chants.  

With Trump thinking so little of Pence, it remains to be seen whether the former vice president’s views on Kennedy will carry any weight on Capitol Hill. In the Senate, however, Republicans may see abortion as a more important issue than Trump’s opinion, which might doom Kennedy’s nomination. Kennedy also has other skeletons that could prevent his nomination to a Cabinet position: animal skeletons.