(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk, who now runs the government efficiency initiative he calls DOGE, sketched out plans for aggressive cuts to US spending and regulations that include wiping out the US Agency for International Development — and suggested the bond market should thank him for it.
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“We’ve just got to do wholesale spring cleaning” of US regulations, Musk said during an X Spaces session after midnight. In one of his biggest planned cuts to date, the billionaire backer of Donald Trump said his group is in the process of trying to shut down USAID, the foreign aid agency codified by Congress.
Musk said he has Trump’s blessing for the move to end USAID as a stand-alone agency and fold what’s left of it into the State Department. If it turns out the US really needs such an organization in the future — or any of the regulations he aims to cull — they could simply just be created again.
Musk also said he’d be giving a talk this week with JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon in an effort to convince bond markets that his cost-cutting initiative known as DOGE should instill confidence in US debt.
Concerns over widening deficits and worries about inflationary policies catapulted Treasury yields higher from their September lows, both into and after the US election. Any signs of deep spending cuts which would improve the fiscal deficit would be good news for bond bulls betting on yields turning lower.
Musk’s comments came in a nearly hour-long audio conversation on X and marked the first time Musk has spoken publicly at length about DOGE since Trump became president. He was joined in the freewheeling conversation by Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, as well as former DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy.
The breadth of Musk’s activity over Trump’s first two weeks suggests that Musk has broadened DOGE’s mandate far beyond the executive order creating it, which simply tasked the group with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
Musk’s DOGE teams spent the weekend gaining access to Treasury payment systems and firing officials at US Agency for International Development. DOGE is short for the Department of Government Efficiency, and the US Doge Service is housed under the executive office of the president.