Don't Mess With Taxes

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Donald J. Trump has fulfilled one presidential campaign promise. He has named billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Now we’ll see if they can actually streamline the federal government and dramatically cut its costs.

DOGE details: First, a quick look at DOGE.

Despite its name, DOGE is not an official federal department or government agency, but rather a presidential advisory board.

Trump noted that status in naming Musk and Ramaswamy as co-leaders, adding that they will “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” in order to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies.”

The deadline to achieve that goal is July 4, 2026.

As for the name, Musk came up with it. The acronym apparently is a nod to the doge dog meme and Dogecoin crypto currency often referenced by the electric vehicle/space exploration/social media mogul. Musk was one of Dogecoin’s biggest supporters, even temporarily changing the X (formerly Twitter) logo to the dog logo in 2023, triggering a spike in the digital currency’s value.

DOGE goals: Now the hard part. Coming up with changes that are efficient without decimating the services they provide to millions of U.S. citizens.

So, this weekend’s Saturday Shout Outs go to coverage of DOGE, its professed goals, and some perspectives on how it can or cannot be achieved.

Let’s start with the duo with the big plans. “Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decades-long executive power grab,” say Musk and Ramaswamy in their Wall Street Journal commentary piece The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.

The pair doesn't go into details in their introduction of what they want to do. Rather, they focus on how they would accomplish the downsizing.

But since the Internal Revenue Service has long been targeted for reductions by Republicans, it wouldn't be a surprise to see the agency greatly reduced. They've already tossed around the idea of mobile app Americans could use to file their taxes free with the IRS.

Apparently the DOGE tax app would replace the current no-cost options of Free File, recently renewed for five years, and IRS' own expanding Direct File tax preparation and e-filing software.

And DOGE reactions: Ja'han Jones, writer of The ReidOut Blog for MSNBC, offers his comments on the pair’s WSJ piece in Musk and Ramaswamy lay out a brutal plan for American austerity. Their plan to slash government programs borrows from an Argentinian plan that caused a massive spike in poverty, says Jones.

"The masterminds behind the proposed government efficiency agency have provided more detail about how it would function. Their explanations only makes their enterprise seem less plausible," writes Matt Ford in his TNR article The More You Learn About Elon Musk’s DOGE, the Less Sense It Makes.

Bess Levin focuses on the proposed DOGE mandate to end remote work by federal employees in her Vanity Fair article Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Cutting Edge Idea for Shrinking the Budget: Fire Everyone Who Doesn’t Want to Work in the Office Five Days a Week. 

Speaking of work, Elon Musk's DOGE Is Hiring — Here Are the Details, writes Colin Laidley, an associate editor at Investopedia. Hiring, however, isn't the technically correct term. Laidley notes that Musk and Ramaswamy are looking for "super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries" who are willing to take on a tedious volunteer opportunity.

While the DOGE plan and its two, shall we say, outspoken leaders is getting a lot of attention, the idea to remake the federal bureaucracy is not new. Mark Trahant, editor at large for ICT, looks at some previous proposals in Rethinking government (again). 

DOGE podcast on the way: Finally, since the first Shout Out was to Musk an Ramaswamy, I’m closing with them, too.

Although the duo is charged with streamlining the federal government, they are adding to how they will do that. A podcast on the process is on the way.

“Elon and I are going to start a separate track of DOGEcasts that explain exactly what we’re doing to the public to provide transparency,” Ramaswamy said in a YouTube video (embedded below). “And what is a once-in-a-generation project? We want to bring the public along with us to lift the curtain, to take us behind the scenes of what actually that waste, fraud, and abuse in government looks like.”

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