If former President Donald Trump lands in the White House and gets his way, fellow billionaire Elon Musk, the X, Tesla, and SpaceX entrepreneur, might have another job: targeting wasteful government spending.
Most likely, Musk won’t get a Cabinet post, The Washington Post reported. But he might just wind up consulting with Trump on government efficiency.
Musk has bandied the intriguing idea about on X, much to the consternation of leftists. They’re anxious to see him jailed because they no longer control the social-media platform.
Guardian writers called for his arrest three times in August, and leftists are delighted that Brazil has shut down access to the platform they once considered their exclusive preserve. Or playground, as the case may be.
Auditing Agencies
Trump and his advisors are mulling the creation of a government efficiency panel, and Musk, the Post reported, “has expressed interest in being part of a “government efficiency commission” aimed at “eliminating wasteful regulations and spending.”
On the Shawn Ryan Show, the newspaper continued, Trump said Musk wouldn’t join the Cabinet because of his many business enterprises, but could “consult with the country and give you some very good ideas.”
Musk has moved from supporting President Joe Biden to supporting Trump in this election, the Post observed. So of course, “scrutiny is mounting over the potential financial benefits a potential second Trump administration could deliver to Musk.”
One can guess that zero “scrutiny is mounting over the potential financial benefits” that would accrue to the bazillionaire leftists who support Harris and would likely join her administration, but in any event, Musk isn’t the only tycoon who might join a commission on waste. Others, the Post reported, include former FedEx chieftain Fred Smith and former Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli.
As for Musk, the Post noted that his companies, notably, SpaceX, have received billions of dollars in government contracts.
“It raises questions that the commission’s focus is on saving taxpayer dollars, but you have someone potentially involved whose company is one of the biggest recipients of federal spending,” Open Secrets’ Anna Massoglia told the Post. “Cracking down on government waste and abuse is important, but we also need to have accountability mechanisms so private sector actors involved in this kind of program can’t manipulate it for personal gain.”
One analyst observed the obvious. A Harris administration would have just as much potential for conflicts of interest among its uber-wealthy Cabinet members:
Samuel Hammond, a policy expert at the center-right Foundation for American Innovation, pointed out that Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris also has numerous large Silicon Valley boosters and other donors with extensive business in front of the federal government.
“Do Kamala Harris backers want to get subsidies for clean energy projects?” Hammond said. “In the case of Musk, I think his main demand is to be left alone.”
Putting Musk into a consulting position would, of course, send the far Left into fits of teeth-gnashing rage. The Left is furious that he purchased Twitter and made it a safe space for free speech. The bullying Left no longer controls it.
As The New American reported yesterday, three writers for the quasi-Marxist Guardian, notably former labor secretary Robert Reich, want Musk jailed.
Musk “is rapidly transforming his enormous wealth … into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing Trump and other authoritarians around the world,” the perpetually peeved Reich wrote.
Reich fretted that Trump and Musk would be “governing together if Trump wins a second term.”
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” Reich fumed.
“Blue Ribbon” Commission
Reich aside, the commission appears to be a pet project for Trump, the Post explained, who “for months expressed interest in establishing a ‘blue ribbon’ commission of top executives to eliminate wasteful federal spending, said Steve Moore, who pitched the former president on the idea.”
Moore is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and the founder of the Club for Growth.
The new commission would be modeled on the Grace Commission, the panel that President Reagan created by executive order and that identified billions of dollars in wasteful spending. Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, the shortened name came from its chief Grace Company CEO Peter Grace. The commission utterly failed. Congress ignored its recommendations and the big spending continued as usual.
Still, another panel to target waste is necessary, Moore told the Post:
“It should be a high priority. We have a lot of spending and waste to cut if we’re going to extend the Trump tax cuts or do these other things he wants to do,” Moore said. “You’ll have to find redundancies and inefficiencies and obsolescence, but the good news is we haven’t done this in a couple decades.”
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Art Laffer — who have sometimes advised Trump on economic policy — strongly favor the plan, they said in interviews. Nonpartisan budget hawks also expressed support for the idea.
Moore said he was unsure if Musk would be interested in chairing the commission, but said he would be “absolutely perfect to run it.”
Two snags for any such commission, the newspaper noted, are the permanent and increasing costs of Medicare and Social Security — “the primary drivers of the nation’s long-term fiscal imbalance.”
National Debt
Any efficiency panel will have a task akin to the fifth of Hercules’ 12 labors: cleaning the Augean stables.
The National Debt is $35.3 trillion and climbing into the stratosphere like a SpaceX rocket. Federal spending is $7 trillion and shooting skyward at the same speed. Federal deficit: $2 trillion.
The debt per citizen is $104,595, and per taxpayer is $268,303.
Medicare spending is $1.8 trillion and rising; Social Security is 1.47 trillion. Defense: $922 billion.
Those figures almost certainly won’t decrease under a second Trump administration.
