If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy implemented just one single reform during their new cost-cutting government board, it could save taxpayers $1.7 trillion, enough to shave nearly one full year off of the national deficit, a congressman has revealed.

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped the two billionaires to oversee the soon-to-be-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In addition to eliminating the perennial targets of waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE promises to “delete” whole federal agencies, if necessary, to make government operate in taxpayers’ interests once again. Experts say streamlining the federal budget could yield the American people abundant savings year after year.

“If you were to set aside all the rules in place, put in place by the Biden administration and this bureaucratic state … you would save $1.7 trillion,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice last Friday.

Regulations added to the federal code during the Biden-Harris administration have imposed $1.7 trillion on the private sector over the last four years, “surpassing all predecessors,” according to a recent federal report.

The administration also imposed 300 hours of paperwork on businesses, according to the report titled “Death by a Thousand Regulations: The Biden-Harris Administration’s Campaign to Bury America in Red Tape,” released September 25 by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

A stunning $1.3 trillion of the $1.7 trillion (76%) in added regulatory burden comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the report found.

“To cement radical left-wing priorities, the Biden-Harris administration spared no expense and pushed a whole-of-government regulatory blitz on American businesses and consumers,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.). “The Biden-Harris administration’s extreme regulatory overreach has only suffocated the American dream.”

“The Biden-Harris administration has added nearly 200 major regulations — those carrying an annual price tag of $100 million or more — to the books,” noted the Foundation for Government Accountability’s Liesel Crocker in August.

The regulatory state has grown so far out of control that tens of thousands of felonies were “rule-created by the bureaucracy — not created by Congress, but by the bureaucrats,” Biggs told Hice.

Eliminating just the Biden-Harris administration’s regulations would save nearly enough money to erase this year’s entire federal deficit of $1.8 trillion.

Within the last week, the U.S. national debt reached a record high of $36 trillion — $2 trillion higher than at the beginning of the year. Creating such a large federal deficit has moral implications, commentators say. Racking up “$36 trillion in debt is immoral,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Monday. “Spending money that does not belong to you and you have no intention of paying back is theft.”

President Donald Trump tried to curb regulatory power early in his first term, issuing an executive order mandating that, for every one new regulation added to the federal code, two must be eliminated. He seems poised to expand that margin in his second term. “I’m pledging today that in my second term, we will eliminate a minimum of 10 old regulations for every one new regulation,” President Trump told the Economic Club of New York in September.

The newly formed DOGE will also take a scalpel to the federal budget, its founders promise. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Ramaswamy vowed to abolish the Department of Education and defund National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood. The abortion giant alone receives nearly $700 million in taxpayer funding each year.

At the same time, the House of Representatives plans to form a DOGE Committee, led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), to assist the DOGE department’s efforts in Congress. The committee is “going to try and identify programs, agencies, departments that are redundant, that are wasteful and slip those over to the legislative branch, which is where we sit. And they’ll have hearings and introduce legislation that will decouple those wasteful programs and agencies from the federal government. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new chairwoman, has said that she expects to close agencies and fire people,” said Biggs.

Together, the two DOGE entities will create a “synergistic effect,” he said.

In the end, said Biggs, the House of Representatives must use the normal budgeting process to rein in out-of-control spending. “This is why the bureaucratic state is growing: Every time you do a continuing resolution, you keep funding the same programs at the same levels. Periodically there will be an omnibus that raises all that spending. You’re just on cruise control,” Biggs told Hice. “The way you stop it is you actually do your appropriations bills and you say, ‘We’re not going to fund Planned Parenthood. We’re not going to fund various DEI programs or woke programs in the military or anything else,’ that will be designated by DOGE or designated by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s subcommittee on Oversight.”

Despite America’s polarized nature, Biggs says he believes many of DOGE’s commonsense proposals will find bipartisan support. “Some Democrats have come up to me privately and told me they agree” that Congress has to “get some [power that resides in the federal government] back to the states, where it was always intended to be under the Constitution.”

“The focus is going to be on the fourth branch of government, which is the bureaucracy,” Biggs emphasized. “The federal government is so upside down big that it needs to be turned right side and made right-sized again.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

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