What Musk, Ramaswamy and Vought are trying to do
There's a precedent for the extreme budget cutters, and it carries lessons for today

In 1980, a little-known young congressman from Michigan caught the attention of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan by impersonating a rival in a mock debate.
His performance was so good that Reagan’s team asked him to play President Jimmy Carter in preparation for a general election debate.
David Stockman aced it.
Thin, driven, titanically ambitious — this was the persona Stockman projected when he sought and won the key job of director of the Office of Management and Budget in the administration that took office in 1981. “His shaggy hair was streaked with gray, and yet he seemed like a gawky collegian, with unstylish glasses and a prominent Adam’s apple,” wrote The Washington Post’s William Greider.
A former anti-war protester who had dropped out of Harvard Divinity School, he was skilled at attracting influential mentors, including Rep. John Anderson (the Reagan rival he played in the first mock debate), Sen. Patrick Moynihan and Rep. Jack Kemp. By the time Stockman joined the administration at the age of 34, he was a zealous supporter of supply-side economics, the doctrine Reagan embraced.
“Stockman is the youngest person to hold Cabinet rank in more than 150 years,” Walter Shapiro wrote in the Washington Post in February, 1981. “He comes to power with a controversial agenda to transform American economic policy and a young man's faith in the potency of his own ideas.”
“Stockman wants to mount a frontal assault on the federal budget. He isn't cowed by the congressional appropriations process. Nor is he frightened by the special interests nor liberal bleeding-hearts who defend their favorite sections of the budget with the ferocity of junkyard dogs…Stockman, who believes in free market economics, wants to declare holy war on the kind of federal regulations that businessmen curse over their martinis.”
The regulatory state is the same bullseye identified by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in their Wall Street Journal manifesto for the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), an outside-government group created with the support of President-elect Donald Trump and intended as an advisory organization to work closely with the OMB, headed by Trump appointee Russell Vought.
DOGE will target federal regulations written by “unelected bureaucrats” and present Trump with lists of rules that can be scrapped. “A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.
But as Stockman’s experience showed, it’s not that simple.
Budget-cutting blues
David Stockman got right to work on the federal budget. He “began summoning the members of the Reagan Cabinet, one by one, into his high-ceilinged conference room in the ornate Old Executive Office Building to inform them how he intended to slash their budgets,” Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the New York Times in March, 1981. “In a polite but relentless manner, the 34-year-old director of the Office of Management and Budget, a generation younger than the Cabinet secretaries, was defining the limits of their jobs.”
“Some accepted his decisions — which led to unprecedented cuts of more than $40 billion in the 1982 budget proposed by the Carter Administration — with no more than a murmur. But others threatened open warfare. ‘Frank and brutal’' is the way a Presidential adviser characterizes some of these exchanges.”
Secretary of State Al Haig objected to Stockman’s proposed cut of $2.6 billion in foreign aid but was only able to negotiate that down somewhat — to a flat $2 billion. When Reagan presented his budget, it included “83 major budget cuts engineered by Stockman,” according to Blumenthal.
Amid the effort, Stockman had agreed to meet William Greider of the Washington Post regularly for breakfasts at the Hay-Adams Hotel where the new budget director would candidly describe his battles with other Washington power brokers. The discussion was meant to be kept off the record until the end of the budget season, according to Greider.
The result was an explosive Atlantic magazine article by Greider in December, 1981. It landed in Washington with the impact that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s cooperation with Rolling Stone magazine would have in 2010. (One difference: McChrystal was fired by President Barack Obama, while Stockman managed to keep his job.)
In his chats with Greider, Stockman lamented his inability to get Reagan to endorse reductions in the defense budget and in Social Security, two of the biggest areas of government spending, then and now. He committed what Republicans saw as a major gaffe by agreeing that “supply side economics” was really a new form of the old “trickle-down” theory that tax cuts for upper-income Americans would have beneficial effects upon the less affluent.
The 1981 budget cuts were less than met the eye, Stockman conceded privately to Greider. “It has really slowed down the momentum, but it hasn’t stopped what you would call the excessive growth of the budget.”
Looking back at the budget-cutting exercise, he added, “The reason we did it wrong—not wrong, but less than the optimum—was that we said, Hey, we have to get a program out fast. And when you decide to put a program of this breadth and depth out fast, you can only do so much. We were working in a twenty- or twenty-five-day time frame, and we didn’t think it all the way through. We didn’t add up all the numbers.”
Stockman’s impact
As Doug Bandow observed in May, 1985 for Reason magazine, “by the end of Reagan's first term, the old revolutionary fervor had come to naught.” Reagan’s “zeal to cut the budget had disappeared. Last year, in fact, the government spent nearly half again as much in nominal dollars as it spent under President Carter in 1980. Washington gobbled up a quarter of the country's GNP (gross national product) in 1983, which is a peacetime record.” Bandow’s article was headlined, “The Budget Revolution That Wasn’t.”
And Stockman himself admitted to failure in his 1986 memoir. The Washington Post summed it up this way: “The ‘Reagan revolution’ in fiscal and economic policy was doomed from the outset by President Reagan's ignorance and stubbornness and by ‘ultimately incompetent advisers’ who deceived the president and the country, former budget director David A. Stockman contends in his book on his White House years.”
The challenge for DOGE
With Trump limited to one more term and facing the 2026 midterm elections, DOGE will also be under intense time pressure to accomplish its goals. (Musk and Ramaswamy have set the July 4, 2026 — the nation’s 250th birthday — as the project’s end date.)
The new OMB director, Russell Vought, bought into a fast-track approach in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
The New York Times reported, “Mr. Vought laid out ideas for how Mr. Trump ‘has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective, to be able to dismantle’ the power of federal agencies and civil servants.”
Vought told Carlson, “The American people currently are not in control of their government, and the president hasn’t been either. We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch.”
He has offered further insight into his worldview in a contribution to the Heritage Foundation’s controversial “Project 2025.” The chapter he wrote is not a breezy read. It’s filled with acronyms such as RMOs, PADs, PAYGO, OFPP, OPPPM, MIAO and more.
But in two sentences, Vought sums up the mission as he sees it: “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”
Does this sound like an effort that Donald Trump could realistically get and stay behind? He would have to embrace focus and discipline to a degree he has never attained. He would also have to back cuts on politically popular programs which have strong constituencies in Congress and around the country. And he would need to embrace reductions in spending programs that benefit wealthy supporters and powerful corporations.

Still, DOGE is a project worth our attention, wrote Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post. “The federal government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome. There are more than 180,000 pages of federal regulations. Surely it’s worth taking a close look at them and retiring many.”
Moreover, Zakaria noted, “much of the rage that has built up among parts of the Republican base over decades has been centered on the notion that party leaders have promised a massive downsizing of the state but never delivered.”
“With DOGE, we might finally get an effort to actually deliver on the central Republican promise of the past 90 years. And we will find out what America thinks of it.”
Dan Balz wrote of the many obstacles facing the effort. DOGE “amounts to a wholesale attack on federal agencies designed to eliminate thousands of regulations, reduce the federal workforce by an order of magnitude that could cripple the delivery of vital services, and effect cost savings that would amount to nearly one-third of the federal budget, or the entire discretionary part of the budget and then some.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column injected more skepticism. “Giving it a dramatic name like the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our era and appointing wealthy men with social-media clout to take action won’t make freeing favored industries from regulation easy. Many of the Trump administration’s efforts to throw out or rewrite Washington’s rulebook might be challenged, fizzle or fail outright.”
“A good way to handicap their odds is to look at how administrations have fared in the past. Back in 2017, Trump as president signed an executive order stipulating that federal agencies should withdraw two rules for each new one issued. But in practical effect, the results were often mixed, according to several analyses. Taking away significant rules can be much harder than simply not making new ones.”
Stockman’s verdict
David Stockman himself hasn’t been silent on what he thinks of Trump as an economic policy maker. So let’s give him the final word.
The former Reagan OMB director left government for a career in the private sector, but has also written prolifically on federal spending and the economy. His verdict: “Donald Trump isn't remotely an economic conservative; he doesn't believe in small government. I don't think he believes in free markets. And certainly he had no affinity whatsoever for sound money or fiscal rectitude…”
The clearest evidence cited by Stockman, in a Reason magazine interview: “When Trump was sworn in, the public debt was $20 trillion already, and it had been swelling rapidly for several decades. When he left, it was close to $28 trillion.” The $8 trillion increase is “the kind of number that grasps you by the collar and tells you, this guy is part of the swamp. He’s not part of the solution.”