In an August interview with Donald Trump conducted on X, Elon Musk pitched the idea of a special commission that would look for ways to drastically reduce government spending. “I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said in the interview. “I’d love it,” Trump replied. “You’re the greatest cutter.”

This is the origin story of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will be headed by Musk as well as entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. DOGE will be an outside advisory committee rather than a formal part of the government, reporting to the president about what federal spending Musk and Ramaswamy deem unnecessary or wasteful. A “lean team of small-government crusaders,” as they put it, will plan to cut $2 trillion, about a third of the federal budget. (The acronym DOGE comes from one of Musk’s favorite internet memes.)

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy attempted to outline their plan. In their telling, “unelected, unappointed civil servants” create regulations that constrain freedom and waste taxpayer money. Two recent Supreme Court decisions that limit the power of federal departments will help Musk and Ramaswamy achieve their goals. Because of those rulings, Congress and the courts no longer have to defer to agencies’ expertise, so DOGE will be free to recommend which regulations to dispense with. Musk and Ramaswamy argue in their op-ed that Trump can now refuse to enforce the regulations deemed disposable, reducing the agencies’ funding and personnel needs.

While cutting waste and reducing the budget deficit are good things in the abstract, what Musk and Ramaswamy have in mind would be harmful to the country. They make no secret of the fact that they intend to cut the jobs of “deep state” bureaucrats who are supposedly pushing woke ideology with their DEI initiatives and foreign aid. The DOGE team also wants to shrink the role of the federal government in providing basic services to people.

The good news is that Musk and Ramaswamy’s goal of $2 trillion in cuts is probably an impossible target. To reach it, they’d have to shrink the military and gut Medicare and Social Security, which Trump promised on the campaign trail he wouldn’t touch. And it probably isn’t true that Trump can unilaterally decide not to enforce whatever regulations he doesn’t like. Musk and Ramaswamy seem to have different approaches to their project: Musk seems especially concerned with regulations that affect his own businesses, while Ramaswamy just wants to take a hammer to it all.

Or maybe a chainsaw. Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump have all expressed admiration for Argentine president Javier Milei, who has overseen a severe austerity program meant to get his country’s very high inflation under control. He campaigned with a chainsaw to make his point. Since taking office in 2023, Milei has closed ten of Argentina’s eighteen federal departments and cut funding for healthcare, welfare, and education. The result is that, while inflation is under control, the country endured a recession and people are struggling to afford food. Musk, meanwhile, called Argentina “a helpful model for the rest of the world” and Ramaswamy advocates “Milei-style cuts on steroids.” Trump may have promised not to cut the most popular entitlement programs, but DOGE doesn’t seem to agree.

This shift in Trumpworld from populism to what New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called an “old-fashioned small-government conservatism in feral tech-bro form” has the potential to hurt lots of people who voted for Trump because they saw him as a champion of the working class. If Musk and Ramaswamy get their way, those people will have to fend for themselves so that the government can balance the budget and lower taxes for the rich at the same time.