Elon Musk—fresh off wreaking havoc across the federal bureaucracy—pledged on Thursday that his DOGE task force will “delete entire agencies.”
During a remote address to the World Government Summit in Dubai, President Donald Trump’s lieutenant suggested dramatic shutdowns of permanent federal bodies were necessary to prevent future administrations from staffing them up again.
“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” he told the summit audience. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
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Musk threw around a seemingly arbitrary estimate of just how deep his Department of Government Efficiency task force—charged with recommending $2 trillion in federal spending cuts by mid-2026—could cut.
“There’s roughly 450 agencies of one kind or another,” he said. “That’s almost an average of two agencies per year since the formation of the United States. I mean how many agencies do you really need to run a country? 99? Not 450, that’s for sure.”
Since Trump was inaugurated, Musk’s DOGE has launched a blitz of efforts to dismantle elements of the federal bureaucracy, driven by a team of dubiously qualified teenage and twenty-something lackeys, including one nicknamed “Big Balls.”
Among the initiatives DOGE has been involved in was a buyout offer sent by the administration to two million federal workers—it was temporarily blocked by a judge after workers' unions sued.
DOGE has also gained sensitive access to systems at several departments, including the Treasury (now blocked by a judge) and the Department of Education, which Trump pledged to dismantle during the election campaign.
Musk announced earlier this month that he would shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and has in recent days hinted at a similar fate for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where employees were told to cease performing “any work tasks” beginning this week.
“We really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people—democracy,” he told the summit audience.
Musk used the dismantling of USAID to emphasize that the Trump administration is “less interested in interfering with the affairs of other countries” before suggesting a non-profit grantmaking foundation focused on groups that promote democracy abroad and funded by Congress could find itself in the crosshairs as well.
“There’s like the National Endowment for Democracy,” he said. “But I’m like, ‘Okay, well, how much democracy have they achieved lately?’”
Musk, the CEO of carmaker Tesla and the world’s richest man, addressed a wide range of topics during a session that lasted just over half an hour.
That included a bizarre aside—while talking about the Trump administration’s dismantling of diversity and inclusion initiatives—where he suggested an artificial intelligence with diversity as one of its values would start murdering men.
“If hypothetically, AI is designed for DEI, you know, diversity at all costs, it could decide that there’s too many men in power and execute them,” Musk said.
Meanwhile, the man who coined Musk’s DOGE pledge to “delete” agencies is on the sidelines.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who was originally tasked by Trump to lead the task force alongside Musk, was the first to suggest that agencies would be “deleted outright” during the transition period last year.
Ramaswamy quit DOGE last month, weeks after a clash with Musk over the tech industry’s use of foreign workers that made him the odd man out and spurred Musk to tell associates he wanted him gone.
He has since begun organizing a bid for Ohio governor, which he is expected to launch this month with the help of key members of Vice President JD Vance’s political team.
