“Musk, the tech tycoon and Donald Trump confidant, made it known that he wanted Ramaswamy out of DOGE in recent days, according to three people familiar with Musk’s preferences who, like others for this article, were granted anonymity to discuss them. An ill-received holiday rant on X by Ramaswamy about H-1B visas apparently hastened his demise.
Just 69 days after Trump announced the team, Ramaswamy is now leaving DOGE and planning to announce a run for Ohio governor next week.
“Elon Musk — who, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, has been tasked by President-Elect Trump with running a new Department of Government Efficiency — posted on his platform X that he wants to “Delete CFPB,” referring to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The agency, Musk said, was part of a problem of “too many duplicative regulatory agencies” in Washington. But there are no other agencies in the federal government returning money to Americans’ bank accounts in the way the CFPB does.
Since its founding, the agency has returned more than $19 billion in cash to people who have been scammed by financial institutions, including predatory payday lenders and even some of the largest banks in the country. It has done so under Republican and Democratic presidents, including major actions against Wells Fargo and Equifax during President Trump’s first term in office, which, combined, returned $425 million to consumers. (Those actions both began under the Obama administration, but Trump’s CFPB directors oversaw the execution of those fines.)”
“even as the former Trump strategist claims that Musk has limited influence, Bannon acknowledged that Musk had backed Trump’s campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he “deserves a place at the table.””
“Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.”
“Were Trump to implement Musk’s vision while simultaneously honoring his promise to avoid cutting entitlements and the GOP’s commitment to avoiding defense spending cuts, then he would need to slash all other government programs by 80 percent. That would involve gutting all social services for low-income Americans, food inspections, air safety, health insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments, among countless other things.
This would abruptly and massively reduce demand in the US economy, potentially triggering a recession.
There is little reason to expect such severe and haphazard spending cuts to benefit the economy in the long term. After all, government investments in education and infrastructure often increase the economy’s growth potential — slashing funding for such programs could impair America’s economic performance in the coming decades.”