Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), outlined their vision in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday.

In the piece, Musk and Ramaswamy criticized the current structure of government, calling it “antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision” because it shifts power away from elected officials and into the hands of unelected bureaucrats.

The department was created to “cut the federal government down to size,” they wrote. “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long.”

They went on to say that the Trump transition team has brought them aboard to lead a lean team of “small-government crusaders” who will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”

“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions,” the pair wrote.

The agency plans to work with legal experts and use “advanced technology” to figure out where cuts can be made immediately, which they say will “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”

They write that DOGE will aim to eliminate $500 billion in annual federal expenditures every year that are “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

Musk and Ramaswamy also called for comprehensive audits of federal contracts that have gone unchecked, arguing that such reviews could generate “significant savings” for taxpayers.

They expressed their intention to dissolve the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by July 4, 2026, aiming to resolve many of the nation’s spending issues by the time the country celebrates its 250th anniversary.