Over the last half year, the Department of Government Efficiency has undergone an unexpected journey. What began as an idea envisioned by Elon Musk—and informally embraced by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump—has now solidified into an actual government office with a high-profile role in Washington. While thus far DOGE has largely been focused on budget-cutting and staff reductions, recent developments suggest it is shifting its attention back to the ambitious regulatory rollback originally envisioned by its creators.
The Early Days
Last summer, Musk pitched the idea of a new federal efficiency commission tasked with rooting out government waste. Candidate Trump publicly supported the proposal, and as soon as he won the election, the initiative became more concrete. A high-profile op-ed in the Wall Street Journal spotlighted the prospect of an office co-led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The op-ed emphasized the opportunity that recent Supreme Court rulings have created to challenge potentially unlawful or unconstitutional regulations. The aim was to identify questionable rules across the government and then pare back enforcement wherever possible.
Regulatory Reform Takes A Back Seat?
Ramaswamy was heavily involved in shaping the office’s original regulatory focus, but he eventually departed to run for governor of Ohio. When Trump was sworn in, DOGE was formally created through an executive order. However, the office was given a narrower directive than originally conceived. The new department was simply a rebranded version of an existing agency, the U.S. Digital Service. Its primary responsibility would be technology modernization across federal agencies, rather than the far-reaching regulatory deconstruction first imagined.
Although DOGE has been aggressive in its actions out of the gate, DOGE staff seem most focused on audits of agency budgets and on achieving workforce cuts, creating the impression that regulation has slipped off the priority list. Yet a flurry of recent executive orders suggests the pendulum may be swinging back again toward deregulation—and that DOGE could be a key player in that effort.
Signs DOGE Is Returning To Its Original Mission
New White House directives have imposed a 10-to-1 deregulation policy, asserted presidential control of independent agencies, and reinstated the regulatory budget from Trump’s first term. A telling sign of DOGE’s renewed priorities is the department’s launch of a website that includes a dedicated section on regulations. There, visitors can see data tracking regulatory word counts and sections by agency.
More importantly, a fresh executive order issued in mid-February instructs federal agencies, along with their DOGE teams, to identify rules that may be unlawful or overly burdensome—and to do so within 60 days. The order calls for categorizing regulations that extend beyond legitimate constitutional or statutory authority, in line with recent Supreme Court precedents on major questions and Chevron deference. As originally described in Musk and Ramaswamy’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, officials are further advised to de-prioritize enforcement of these legally-questionable regulations.
The 60-Day Challenge And Potential Hurdles
While the administration’s refocused attention on cutting excessive rules is promising, it is also fraught with challenges. First, regulations remain legally binding even if the administration chooses not to enforce them. Businesses, eager to avoid any risk of penalties, may well continue to comply with rules on the books, mitigating any near-term relief. Second, formally repealing regulations can be a protracted process, sometimes taking upwards of a year to repeal a single rule. A third issue concerns timing. Although DOGE is equipped with tech-savvy programmers and computer scientists, truly assessing a rule’s legality more often requires teams of lawyers and, in certain instances, input from the courts. Agencies might respond to the 60-day order by simply naming their pre-existing priorities without thoroughly scrutinizing the legal rationale behind old rules.
Setting Concrete Goals For Success
Going forward, DOGE should consider setting clear, quantifiable benchmarks so that success can be easily defined and measured. This could include a goal like eliminating 50,000 pages from the Code of Federal Regulations. At times, Elon Musk has floated a goal to cut $2 trillion in government spending. Some question whether that is achievable, but pivoting this aspiration toward a $2 trillion regulatory cost-saving target might be well within reach. Consider that rolling back just one large-scale rule—Biden’s stringent tailpipe emissions standards for vehicles—could, by government estimates, save $870 billion.
Still, the slow pace of rescinding one rule at a time may not achieve the level of change DOGE’s supporters have in mind. Some states, such as Idaho, have introduced large-scale “sunset provisions,” automatically repealing rules unless they are deliberately reauthorized. If adopted at the federal level, this strategy could accelerate the process of unwinding the thousands of unwanted and harmful regulations on the books.
Looking Ahead
DOGE’s apparent course correction toward its original regulatory mission is a welcome development for those who desire a leaner administrative state. After a month of emphasizing budgetary and staffing cutbacks, the agency once again appears poised to tackle the fundamental question of which federal regulations are valid and justified under current law and the Constitution. That said, much depends on how effectively agencies can sort through and assess questionable rules within the 60-day window—and further on whether DOGE will set, and then achieve, concrete goals for paring down the Code of Federal Regulations.
Whether these moves precipitate a genuine wave of deregulatory reforms, or simply deliver modest incremental improvements, remains to be seen. What is certain is that DOGE’s renewed emphasis on regulations has put to rest concerns that the agency had abandoned a critical part of its mission. For businesses seeking to navigate federal rules, these developments will hopefully translate into tangible savings. For everyone else, the coming months will reveal whether the White House’s revived ambitions for DOGE are more than just rhetoric.