Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is seeking input from top officials from the president-elect’s first term on who to cut in their effort to tackle government waste.
According to a report by Puck News, staffers working for DOGE co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been calling former Trump Cabinet secretaries for their opinions.
They are being asked to prepare two separate lists of people they have served with – one of political appointees and another of career officials.
The former secretaries are being directed to write ‘A’ by names of those they think Trump should bring back and ‘B’ next to those they believe ‘should be blacklisted or fired,’ according to the report.
It is the latest in a series of steps DOGE is taking to get input as it prepares to carry out Trump’s promise to slash government spending.
Last week, DOGE called for the public to submit feedback on ‘wasteful and burdensome regulations.’
Elon Musk with son and Vivek Ramaswamy on Capitol Hill meeting with members of Congress about DOGE in December 5
An account created on X after DOGE was announced last month has been regularly posting on government spending.
That has included expenditure on holograms of dead comedians, a Super Bowl ad on the census, and billions the Pentagon cannot account for.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is establishing a subcommittee in the upcoming Congress with MAGA loyalist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) as the chair to work with DOGE.
Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) also created a Senate DOGE caucus to work with the Trump administration on its effort.
Other lawmakers, including Republicans and some Democrats, have been proposing areas where they believe cuts could be made.
But Musk and Ramaswamy’s effort to significantly reduce the federal workforce could face obstacles due to federal civil service protections.
The new heads of DOGE have already signaled one way they could cut down on the workforce is by ending telework for federal employees, which could prompt some to voluntarily quit.
Trump praised DOGE during his press conference on Monday where he said it was ‘finding things that you would not believe’
It’s a move backed by Republican lawmakers on the Hill as well as Trump.
‘If people don’t come back to work – come back into the office – they’re going to be dismissed,’ Trump insisted at a press conference on Monday.
According to an Office of Management and Budget report from August, 46 percent of civilian personnel were eligible for telework, but only 10 percent of positions were fully remote.
The president-elect on Monday also praised Musk and Ramaswamy for their work and claimed they will eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful spending.
‘I’ll give you a little early report, they’re finding things that you wouldn’t even believe,’ Trump claimed. ‘So we’re looking to save maybe $2 trillion, and it’ll have no impact.’
Trump has given DOGE, which is technically an outside advisory committee and not a government agency, a July 2026 deadline to complete its work.
