Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who leads President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) commission, said the U.S. needs to get rid of “many” of its government agencies in their entirety.
In virtual remarks Thursday to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, the Tesla CEO compared his efforts to root out waste from the federal government to rooting out weeds from a garden.
“I think we do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind,” Musk said, “because if you leave part of them behind… 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. But if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn’t stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it harder.”
“So we have to really delete entire agencies, many of them,” he added.
The remarks come as Musk, in the first few weeks of Trump’s presidency, has led a bold effort to reshape the federal government — including offering hundreds of thousands of federal workers a buyout from their jobs and being given controversial access to payment systems within the Treasury Department and other agencies.
The effort has led to numerous lawsuits and fierce pushback from Democratic lawmakers and others who say Trump and Musk are operating outside the bounds of the law. Some federal courts have sought to limit the scope of their reach.
Musk, in his remarks Thursday, criticized the U.S. government as being too bureaucratic and overregulated.
“We really have here rule of the bureaucracy, as opposed to rule of the people democracy,” the tech giant said. “We want to restore rule of the people.”
“And so, what that means is reducing the size of the federal government, basically reducing regulation,” he added. “You know, there’s a tremendous amount of over regulation that’s happened over time.”
The Associated Press contributed.
