Elon Musk, the director of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, appears to be expanding his reach even further. He now says that, in order for America to have long-term prosperity, “many” entire federal government agencies will have to be eliminated — a process he likened to pulling out weeds by their roots so they do not grow back.
“I think we need we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave part of them behind,” the tech billionaire who heads several companies that have received billions in federal government contracts, announced on Wednesday (video below) in remarks to the World Governments Summit in Dubai.
“If you leave part of them behind, it’s easy — it’s kind of like leaving a weed, if you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back,” Musk said of agencies, all of which, directly or indirectly, aid the American people and employ thousands of workers.
READ MORE: Musk Complying With Federal Laws White House Says — Will Not Release Disclosure
“But if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn’t stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it harder, he explained. “So so we have to really delete entire eight agencies, many of them. And that’s not to say there won’t be an increase over time of bureaucracy in some new administration, but it will, it’ll be from a much lower baseline. So it’s a step in the right direction.”
Musk, the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and the social media platform X, explained his thought process.
“I think we’ll, the overarching goal here is, like, it’s to lay the foundation for prosperity that will last many decades, you know, maybe centuries. And yeah, will it be forever? Nothing’s forever, but I think we can strengthen the foundations of the United States substantially.”
The Daily Beast added that “Musk threw around a seemingly arbitrary estimate of just how deep his Department of Government Efficiency task force—charged with recommending $2 trillion in federal spending cuts by mid-2026—could cut.”
“There’s roughly 450 agencies of one kind or another,” Musk said. “That’s almost an average of two agencies per year since the formation of the United States. I mean how many agencies do you really need to run a country? 99? Not 450, that’s for sure.”
The richest person on the planet has redirected DOGE from what was supposed to be a means to cut costs inside the federal government, to one that has tried to slash swaths of people and programs. When President Trump announced the so-called “Department,” which is not a federal government agency, he said its purpose was “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
That appears to have changed.
Musk’s DOGE team has come under fire for entering federal agency buildings and accessing computer systems, under the guise of conducting audits.
RELATED: ‘Demolition Plan’: Dems Warn DOGE Guts Government to Empower Billionaires, Harm Americans
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a professor of law and an MSNBC/NBC News legal analyst, wrote on Wednesday: “If a new president was really looking for evidence of waste and fraud in agency spending, he’d send in forensic accountants, investigators, and prosecutors—not coders and hackers. If he really wanted to reform government, he wouldn’t do it by breaking laws, like the ones about how to go about lawfully replacing inspectors general. The lack of commitment to good government—and by extension, to us, the citizens of this country—is apparent everywhere.”
Laurence Tribe, the noted constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, “has already argued that much of Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders on the day of his inauguration disregards the US constitution,” The Guardian reported on Monday. “He told the Guardian he saw Musk’s actions as furthering that culture.”
“On whether Doge and Musk can legally have this much power over an array of government departments, Tribe was emphatic: ‘NO.'”
CNBC reported that Musk, a “special government employee” appointed by Trump, “has been vocal about his aims to improve government efficiency and reduce bureaucracy and regulations, and on Thursday said that such efforts could amount to a $1 trillion reduction in the federal deficit by 2026.”
“Musk has already taken an axe to U.S. Agency for International Development, the international humanitarian and development arm of the U.S. government, by essentially furloughing the majority of its staff and freezing its funding. The sudden change is affecting millions of people around the world, particularly in poorer countries.”
Berkeley Professor of Public Policy Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, pointed to a New York Times graphic on Wednesday and wrote: “When Trump was sworn in, Elon Musk’s corporations were under more than 32 investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies. Most of the cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the federal agencies are being defanged by DOGE. Funny how that works, huh?”
The New York Times is tracking all the lawsuits against the second Trump administration.
There appear to be 15 cases under the “DOGE” section, and 19 under the “Budget freezes and firings” section. (There are seven sections in total.)