President-Elect Donald Trump has named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the proposed Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. The Brookings Institution senior fellow Elaine Kamarck, who was the former director of the National Performance Review, a program under Bill Clinton's administration, joins Asking for a Trend Host Josh Lipton to discuss her expectations around DOGE in the context of her own experience in government efficiency efforts.

"We haven't had a massive look at the federal government since the Clinton administration. That's 30 years ago. 30 years ago, we were able to cut 426,000 workers from the federal payrolls. We were able to slash regulations. We were able to fix problems in various departments. So we had a record there, and a lot of the things that we did 30 years ago are now standard operating procedure in the government," Kamarck says, adding, "It's time for another look. But it has to be a realistic look. And so far, there's not a lot of realism in here."

"The entire federal government each year spends about $6.1 trillion. Most of that money, more than half, is spent on what's called mandatory spending. That means it's Social Security payments. It's Medicare payments. It's retirement payments for veterans, etc. So you can't touch that unless you want to raise a great big political stink. Which guess what? I don't think Trump really wants to do ... Then you've got interest on the debt. and then you've got $1.7 trillion left for what we call discretionary spending," Kamarck says, explaining the discretionary spending goes to things like the military, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Justice Department, the Department of Education, and the Department of Urban Housing and Development.

"Musk [and] Ramaswamy have said they want to cut $2 trillion. Well, that's more than the entire federal discretionary spending. So what you have to ask them is, what are you going to cut? What are you going to do without? And this is where the devil is in the details."

She adds, "There's no doubt that we should take a look at permitting and all this stuff. But that doesn't cut bureaucrats. That doesn't save money." While Musk and Ramaswamy talk about cutting the "fat" from government spending, Kamarck says, "If you try to just lop it off, you're going to cut muscle as well as fat."

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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.