After his election victory in November, Donald Trump announced the creation of what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which now faces lawsuits. Trump said the advisory group, which is not an official government department, would provide recommendations to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.” Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, chosen to lead the group, said they aimed to cut $2 trillion in annual federal spending.
The DOGE advisory group now faces four lawsuits, the first filed by Public Citizen, with its two co-presidents, Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissberg seeking to be included in the commission to make it more balanced.
After Ramaswamy left DOGE to run for Ohio governor, Musk is now the group’s sole leader — who has a multitude of conflicts of interest, since his various companies have billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert about why Public Citizen filed their lawsuit and their end-goal in challenging Trump’s advisory commission.
LISA GILBERT: It is an external entity with tentacles that are reaching into the government, so people positioned in specific government agencies — but advising from the outside primarily, helmed by Elon Musk, obviously a billionaire with no particular government experience. And, the idea is to cut regulations that they deem are burdensome – primarily to industry – and slash government spending.
So, things that are to some, might seem in the pursuit of efficiency, but from our perspective what they’ll be cutting, the types of things they want to do away with, are things that actually protect regular Americans from wrongdoing companies and the richest among us. Things that would regular people and at the end of the day have the potential to transfer massive amounts of wealth to the richest class, which of course Musk is a part of.
So, not something that we think is helpful, not really the way to pursue efficiency and hugely problematic.
MELINDA TUHUS: You and your co-president sent President Trump a letter, suggesting that it might be a good idea to include the two of you in this effort. So, tell me about that. When did you send that and did you get a response?
LISA GILBERT: On Jan. 13, we sent a letter to Trump transition co-chairs Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon with our belief that they are not complying with the Federal Advisory Committee Act. We think that the entity they’re setting up – DOGE – is clearly a federal advisory committee, which means they have to have balanced participation. And being helmed by a billionaire and staffed by tech bros in our perspective is not balanced, and myself and my co-president Robert Weissman, with our long track record of expertise on rule-making and deep service to the public, would provide a very different perspective, so we requested that we become a part of DOGE.
We have not yet gotten a response, though a similar request that came from a colleague organization of ours that is actually a co-filer in our lawsuit against DOGE – States Defending Democracy Fund – did get a response, which was, “We have no room in our administration for Democrats.”
MELINDA TUHUS: You had some suggestions, though, for where you could find lots of cuts to the budget that would make it more efficient and not hurt regular people. Can you talk about some of those?
LISA GILBERT: Our sense is that if one was truly thinking about fixing our government, thinking about efficiency as something that helps regular people, there are lots of things you could do. You could think about ending privatized Medicare for example, or Sen. Sanders also recommended reducing the wasteful Pentagon budget.
You could cut fossil fuel subsidies or reduce drug prices. There actually is a huge set of smart public investments you could make that would make our government more efficient and save money at the same time, but this is not what we expect with the current ideological bent of DOGE, we expect that instead they will be thinking about cutting programs and policies that we all care about, whether we’re talking about the Department of Education or Meals on Wheels or SNAP benefits. The types of cuts that we expect are not things that will make Americans’ lives better.
MELINDA TUHUS: I know that in Trump’s first administration, he was really disorganized. He had actually appointed people who took the job to try to rein him, in which they were successful at doing in some regards. So now, with Project 2025, they’re just following the playbook to basically rewrite government and as you said, make it serve even more the oligarchs and tech bros and Trump’s own family. So, I feel like he could just ignore lawsuits. What does your lawsuit aim to do?
LISA GILBERT: Our lawsuit – which we filed jointly with AFGE, the government employees’ union, and States Defending Democracy Fund – simply says that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency must comply with the requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Despite its name, DOGE is not a department of the U.S. government, as announced by Donald Trump and as reinforced in the executive actions they issued on Day 1. This is an entity that will be advising and so there are a number of requirements that go along with having a federal advisory committee: You have to have a fair balance of viewpoints. You have to have meetings that are held in public and with public notice. You need to have publicly transparent records and work product. So all of these requirements are things that if not happening, make DOGE in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, so we are suing on those grounds.
Learn what other groups are challenging Trump authoritarian policies here.
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