Donald Trump, president-elect of the US, announced on Tuesday that he has selected Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, with plans to reduce bureaucracy in the federal government by roughly a third.

Musk had pushed for a government efficiency department and has since relentlessly promoted it, emphasizing the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu. Trump said the agency will be conducting a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms”.

In a video posted on X two days after the election, Trump said he would “immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order, restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats”. He wants to “clean out the deep state”. His promises echo his slogan on The Apprentice: “You’re fired!” And Project 2025, an influential and controversial blueprint for Trump’s second term, lays out ways to make bureaucrats fireable.

Musk has extensive experience slashing corporate spending, and he has promised to cull federal payrolls in much the same way. He cut staff at X, formerly Twitter, by 80% after buying it in 2022, a move he said prevented a $3bn shortfall, but which has not otherwise paid off. Revenue is in steep decline and advertisers have absconded, making a comeback seem unlikely. As the CEO of SpaceX, however, he has garnered a reputation for launching rockets more cheaply than competitors by negotiating with suppliers and keeping operations lean.

The billionaire does not seem to be under any illusions of what will happen after his proposed cuts, admitting that reducing spending “necessarily involves some temporary hardship”. Americans do want to spend less – of their own money. Do they want austerity and less financial assistance from the federal government? Do they want the world’s richest person admonishing them to cut their expenses?

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, is a wealthy biotech entrepreneur whose first time running for office was for the Republican nomination last year. He told ABC earlier this week that he was having “high-impact discussions” about possible roles in Trump’s cabinet. He also has no government experience, but has pushed for cost-cutting in the corporate sector. After building a stake in the struggling online media firm BuzzFeed, he urged the company in May to cut staff and hire conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson.

Musk has already asked Trump to appoint SpaceX employees to top government positions, the New York Times has reported. The president-elect promised to ban bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they regulate. Such a rule would seem to bar SpaceX’s lieutenants from the Pentagon’s door. But Trump has never shied away from cronyism. The two are not trying to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest: Musk’s role in the government will be structured so that he can maintain control of his companies, the Financial Times reports.

In his first term, Trump and his team struggled to fill the thousands of government appointments needed to run the federal government. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said the administration never fully recovered from its failure to find those appointees. Perhaps adding Musk to the equation is meant to prevent a repeat of such laggardness.

In an extreme version of the new administration, Trump and Musk simply eliminate any position for which they cannot find a friendly appointee. In John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-winning 1980 novel A Confederacy of Dunces, the idiot hero, tasked with organizing an intractable pile of files at his new job, eradicates the company’s mess. Ignatius J Reilly is no genius of organization, though; he is just throwing cabinets full of records away. It is easy to imagine Trump and Musk following his example.

What will stand in Musk’s way, however, is one of his sworn enemies: labor law. Tesla is the only major US carmaker that does not employ a unionized workforce. The billionaire CEO wants to keep it that way. Federal government employees, by contrast, enjoy strong employment protections that would hinder Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to cost-cutting and possibly render it impossible.

For all the different companies he runs, Musk has little experience managing public sector employees. He may find them less pliable lions than he is used to taming.

Kira Lerner contributed to this report