Vivek Ramaswamy could withdraw from working with the Department of Government Efficiency ahead of his bid for Ohio governor, which he intends to formally announce by the last week in January, according to a person close to the matter.
Ramaswamy’s potential exit could upend DOGE, which aims to reduce government spending by up to $2 trillion by July 4, 2026 — by which time his Ohio gubernatorial campaign will need to be well underway. Following the election, Ramaswamy informed members of the transition that he planned to run for governor, said a person familiar with the transition.
Ramaswamy’s decision accelerated when Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine passed over Ramaswamy to replace Vice President-elect JD Vance in the Senate on Friday, picking instead his own Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.
Multiple people who discussed Ramaswamy and the inner workings of DOGE were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly and to freely discuss sensitive issues.
On Saturday, Ramaswamy showed up at an all-hands DOGE meeting at the SpaceX headquarters in Washington, according to two people familiar with the department’s inner workings. Musk was not present.
The breakdown of labor between Musk and Ramaswamy, according to one person familiar, was that Musk focused on the big picture while Ramaswamy focused on deregulation; the rest of the staff will focus on implementation. Steve Davis, Musk’s right hand man at SpaceX, functions as his DOGE lieutenant, while Brad Smith, a healthcare entrepreneur and Rhodes Scholar, is Ramaswamy’s main point of contact.
Privately, some in Trump’s world see Ramaswamy’s nascent gubernatorial campaign as a way to clear a path for Musk to do his own work at the agency without him.
“Elon basically runs the show,” said an informal adviser to Trump. This person added, “Time is their biggest enemy. We’ll see.”
Musk has already dialed back expectations. “I think we’ll try for $2 trillion [in savings], I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Musk recently told Stagwell CEO Mark Penn, the former adviser to Bill Clinton. “But I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. If you try for two trillion, you have a good shot at getting one.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, who has fostered a relationship with Musk over the last decade and has occasionally defended Ramaswamy, said DOGE remains an open question.
“What I have said is Democrats should articulate our own vision on how we cut waste in government and make sure investments are in the interest of the American people, and I have outlined places in the Defense [budget] five primes [the five biggest DOD contractors] where we can make these cuts,” Khanna said. “But in terms of what DOGE is going to do, it’s currently unclear.”
So far, DOGE has been secretive, conducting most of its business over Signal, the encrypted messaging app, and inside SpaceX’s Washington offices.
A person well briefed on the inner workings of DOGE said that multiple executive orders related to its purview are expected in the first week of the Trump administration, including one that deals with government contracts and one that assigns how the DOGE workforce is embedded throughout the federal government.
A representative for Musk and a spokesperson for the transition did not respond to requests for comment. Katie Miller, who Trump appointed to DOGE and who is the wife of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Ramaswamy also declined to comment.
Read the full article here
