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DOGE prepares to tackle health care
The new Department of Government Efficiency is eyeing health-care cuts, among other potential goals.
Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president. Elon Musk runs one of the largest social media platforms.
Neither is set to hold a senior position in Donald Trump’s White House. But together, the two men are volunteering to lead a commission dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — which is explicitly tasked with cutting costs and reducing the size of government.
“The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month.
On their social media accounts, the two men have been kicking around potential goals for their new effort, everything from scrutinizing NGO funding to ending Americans’ clock changes.
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DOGE takes its name from an internet meme related to a dog’s internal monologue. It’s since sparked a tongue-in-cheek cryptocurrency and years of other jokes.
It’s unclear how much power the panel will have, and whether it’s mostly a favor to Trump’s allies — a way to give someone like Musk a role without handing him actual power. Washington’s history is littered with blue-ribbon task forces that won big headlines but accomplished very little.
But some heavy hitters are taking the new commission very seriously.
“DOGE is a bold experiment in government reform,” Paul Winfree, the president and CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Center and a former Trump budget official, wrote Monday in the National Review. Winfree said Musk is using his high-profile platform to make government “cool again,” resurrecting policy proposals that have been overlooked in white papers and watchdogs’ websites.
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DOGE also has attracted glimmers of bipartisan appeal. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), a longtime critic of Musk, said he agrees with efforts to question the Pentagon’s budget and whether billions of dollars have been wrongly spent.
“Elon Musk is right,” Sanders wrote Sunday on X.
Health care is set to be among DOGE’s targets, both by dint of its sprawl and long-standing problems with waste, fraud and abuse.
“Healthcare is a critical frontier for DOGE,” Ramaswamy wrote on X last month, saying that he’d met with Marty Makary, Mehmet Oz and other officials tapped to join the Trump administration’s health-care team. “It’s clear they’re serious about reducing cost & they understand innovation is a key part of the solution (not the problem).”
Ramaswamy and Musk have also floated specific health-care ideas, such as targeting how the National Institutes of Health awards grants and whether they’re wrongly shaped by programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
Another health-related idea is ending Americans’ biannual clock changes, which both men raised last week as another possible objective.
Daylight saving time is both the perfect target for a government commission — Americans mostly don’t like the time changes, but no one has been able to agree on a better solution — and also illustrative of the panel’s likely limits. Congress has historically controlled daylight saving time and legislation to end the clock changes has repeatedly stalled out.
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Other ideas have been kicking around behind the scenes and haven’t spilled onto social media. Winfree said the panel has been briefed about alleged fraud in the Affordable Care Act’s insurance markets, an issue that Republican leaders have worked to elevate this year.
The clock is ticking. DOGE’s recommendations are due by July 4, 2026 – America’s 250th birthday.
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