Musk said “compensation is zero” for the “revolutionaries” who will advise on cuts to the federal budget.

Summary

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) began recruiting “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” willing to work 80+ hours per week with no pay to help slash federal spending.

Appointed by President-elect Donald Trump, the panel is tasked with recommending spending cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and agency restructuring by July 4, 2026.

Musk and Ramaswamy advocate for drastic measures, including cutting grants to nonprofits and potential mass layoffs.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
    2·
    9 days ago

    Ok, get this. You elect politicians to “help slash federal spending”.

    What the hell is Musk even doing and why is he outsourcing this job to unpaid idiots, when politicians already get paid to do this?

    Okay, I’ll do a few suggestions for free:

    • Stop subsidizing companies. All of them.
    • Tax the rich to boost the federal income.
    • Legalize all immigrants so they can be tax paying citizens.
    • Crack down on employers using illegal underpaid illegal immigrants.
    • Provide universal health care. Sick people don’t work.
    • Cut down on police force spending.
    • Cut down on car infrastructure spending.
    • Cut down “defense” spending in artificial oil wars.
    • Help Ukraine to defeat Russia, so Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes, so that USA can also cut down on cost for maintenance of nukes.
    • Expand renewable energy. It’s free energy yo, and it creates jobs for tax paying citizens.
    • Stop mining fossil fuels. It will cost more to clean that shit up than is earned.
    • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      9 days ago

      I just wanted to add some context for one of these bullets.

      The US is upping the amount it spends on nuclear weapons maintenance and production because China has reentered the game as a major player. They’d been stable at 300-350 warheads for decades but is expected to ramp up to producing 100+ per year by 2030.

      So one major adversary has just been replaced by another. Everything old is new again, including the cold war arms race.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 days ago

        How are they making them? Just fuel reprocessing? You can make them pretty cheap as a side effect at scale of you want to. US can’t though.

        • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          8 days ago

          Reprocessing of old pits.

          It’s more a matter of precision, purity, infrastructure, and staffing.

          And you can have them effective/guaranteed to work, safe/without personnel or environmental contamination, or cheap. Pick two.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 days ago

      Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes,

      Interesting. During the Cold War, that was unthinkable, mostly because there’d be nobody to counterbalance a US monopoly on nuclear arms. Things have proliferated considerably since then, so perhaps a nuclear Russia isn’t as important. If anything, they’re proving themselves to be a liability.