Musk’s plan to reorganize the government takes shape, but big questions are looming

The initial reorganization plan for the federal government under President Trump began with three loyal billionaires: the banker Howard Lungick, the technological leader Elon Musk and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Now there is only one left.

Mr. Lunick appeared as Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Commerce Department. Ramaswamy decided to withdraw from the project just before Mr. Trump was in office on Monday.

Consequently, Mr. Musk, the richest man in the world, now fully controls the federal cost reduction effort, which Mr. Trump praised as “potentially the” Manhattan project “of our time”. It remains to be seen exactly how Mr. Musk will use his consolidated power to set the pace and objectives of the so-called Department of Government Effectiveness. But his first measures suggest that he will oversee something that is more like a computer project than the radical operation aimed at reducing the federal budget by at least $ 2,000 billion that Mr. Musk had predicted one day.

The project led by Musk started this week with a little bureaucratic jujitsu: the acquisition of an existing branch of the White House which, in the last decade, had focused on improving government technology. The office, the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States Doge Service, was created in 2014 to repair the failing computer systems that threatened the success of the health insurance overhang of President Barack Obama.

Mr. Musk, who deleted 80 percent of jobs at Twitter after having bought the social media company two years ago, wishes to examine at least some of the 200 employees working in the office before deciding to ‘He must keep them. Their work, according to two people close to his project, who expressed themselves on condition of anonymity to describe the internal plans.

Since this new position in the administration, Mr. Musk immediately obtains a roadmap for the federal bureaucracy, which could allow him to quickly assess the technological capacities of agencies and ministries and to identify potential changes. He should also keep an office in the western wing, which will help him keep crucial access to Mr. Trump and the main collaborators of the White House. Mr. Musk’s allies, on the other hand, obtained key positions within the administration. Amanda Scales, who worked until this month in the artificial intelligence company of Mr. Musk, XAI, is now a chief of staff of the Office of Personal Management, a powerful agency that supervises recruitment within government.