President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an initiative he is calling the Department of Government Efficiency. Both Musk, who runs Tesla, SpaceX and a number of other businesses, and Ramaswamy, who ran for president as a Republican in this year’s primaries, say they can save taxpayers billions of dollars by eliminating wasteful spending.
If the duo’s plans come to fruition, the impact could be significant for federal jobs, which number in the millions. Asher Price, an Austin-based reporter for Axios, recently took a look at how an overhaul of federal agencies could affect jobs in places like Texas. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: How much do we know about what Musk and Ramaswamy have in mind for the federal government? And have they or the president-elect talked about specific reductions in programs or staff?
Asher Price: Well, right now, it’s kind of shock-and-awe rhetoric. Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was running for president last year, had said that he wanted to cut 50% of the federal bureaucrats, as he put it, on day one, should he be elected.
And now he’s in charge of this, I would say, quasi government entity known as DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, right along with Elon Musk. They haven’t given specifics about who exactly they would cut or what programs they would cut.
But Musk as well has warned that anyone who’s involved in governmental waste – and he said of which there are many people – should be worried.
Yeah, I think something that a lot of folks point to is something like 438 agencies and subagencies in the Federal Register right now, and something that a lot of Trump supporters would like to see is a rollback in the number of agencies that there are in the federal government – cut out some of that weight.
You focus in on Austin, obviously a big government town. What can you tell us about federal employment in the Texas capital city? Are there specific agencies at risk of being cut?
There are upwards of 23,000 federal employees in Greater Austin. You know, there are air traffic controllers, postal workers, judges. And you see that kind of mix of federal workers in other Texas cities as well. Of course, they’re administering local Social Security checks.
It’s still unclear who or which programs will be cut. It’s not clear which of these employees in your Texas city might be at risk off getting laid off.
When you’re mentioning some of those agencies, I was thinking about, the IRS has a big office in Austin. Right?
Exactly. The IRS has a big facility in South Austin. And there’s a chance that Congress may not give as much money to the IRS in the future. What that means exactly for IRS workers is unclear.
The president[-elect] has said he wants to get rid of the Department of Education. So, whether there are actual Department of Education federal officers in Texas, I’m not totally sure about. But that’s the kind of thing.
Ramaswamy said he wants to delete federal agencies. There are actual human beings who work at these agencies. So there could be consequences.
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We’ve been talking a lot about Austin here. What about other cities? How does Austin compare with other cities when it comes to federal employment?
Yeah, there are federal workers in every Texas city. And they make up 1.7% of the workforce in Austin, about 2% in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Same in Houston.
And in San Antonio and El Paso we have big military installations. They make up more – I think 4.5% in San Antonio and about 6% in El Paso.
We’re not just talking soldiers there. We’re also talking about civilians?
Exactly. Those are civilian numbers. So it is a portion of the civilian workforce in those cities.
You used that phrase, ‘shock and awe.’ How much of this is rhetorical and how likely is it that we would actually see a genuine cutback in either employees or the number of agencies and sub agencies? Because it seems like a lot of this was mandated by Congress to begin with. And a president making unilateral cuts – question mark?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, first of all, there’s a lot of nondiscretionary spending that the federal government is involved in. I mean, they’re cutting Social Security checks. So you can’t just snap your fingers as President Trump and suddenly federal money goes by the wayside.
So basically, what is going to happen here is that Musk and Ramaswamy are going to make recommendations to the president, who’s going to have to ask Congress to make these cuts. And Congress has historically been allergic to cutting agencies and laying off workers.
In fact, last year, Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from the Texas Hill Country, upbraided his fellow Republicans for not following through on cuts they had promised. So I think that’s kind of the million-dollar question: What is the willingness of lawmakers to take the knife to the budgets of federal agencies?
Million-dollar question. I’m thinking more in the trillions, actually – what I’ve been hearing Musk and Ramaswamy talk about. Have they put a hard number on this? And I wonder how that translates when it comes to jobs.
I haven’t seen it, but I tried to put pen to paper and the average federal employee salary, according to ZipRecruiter, is $106,000 annually. And given that there are more than 2 million civilian federal employees in the U.S., if you cut half of them, which is what Ramaswamy had pledged to do last year, you’d be saving $100 billion annually, roughly.
