Elon Musk calls for ‘wholesale removal’ of federal regulations

Elon Musk wants to nuke federal regulations now and ask questions later.

Mr. Musk, the head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, said the nation should undergo a “wholesale removal of regulations.”

“Like regulations basically should be default gone. Default gone, not default there, default gone, and if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we [can] always add it back in,” Mr. Musk said on a live session on X. “These regulations are added willy nilly all the time.”

Mr. Musk said a “wholesale spring cleaning of regulations” was necessary to get the government “off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.”

“If the government has millions of regulations holding everybody back - it is not freedom,” he said. “We have to restore freedom.”

Last month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that ordered the federal government to scrap 10 regulations for every new one.

“The ever-expanding morass of complicated Federal regulation imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness,” the executive order said.

However, Mr. Musk suggested during the X session this week with Sens. Joni Erst of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah that federal bureaucrats will find ways to “game” the executive order and the government would be better off starting from scratch.

“These regulations, if you look at them, there are millions of them, and it is not like any one regulation is the show stopper,” Mr. Musk said. “The way I sort of visualize it is America is like Gulliver, tied down by millions of little strings, and we need to cut those strings and free the giant.”

Mr. Musk has become a lightning rod in Washington, leading the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate up to $1 trillion in wasteful spending.

Mr. Musk’s allies have praised him for using his bullhorn to highlight what he sees as a bloated federal workforce, agencies that have become too liberal-oriented and questionable federal spending. 

“He’s done a great job,” Mr. Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. “Look at all the fraud that he’s found.” 

Meanwhile, Mr. Musk and the DOGE advisory board he heads have given Democrats something to unite against as they seek footing after a disappointing election cycle. 

They cried foul this week when Mr. Musk said that Mr. Trump had agreed to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has channeled taxpayer assistance into efforts to fight starvation, epidemic and poverty overseas. Mr. Musk and his allies say the agency also has spent much of its aid on wasteful and frivolous programs.

Democrats also sounded the alarm over the Musk-led DOGE being granted access to federal payment systems at the Treasury Department. They warned that it would give Mr. Musk and DOGE access to the personal information of millions of Americans and open the possibility for them to stop the flow of money to programs the Trump administration wants to gut.

“Being innovative is good, but Mr. Musk, this isn’t a tech startup,” Senate Minority Leader Charles S. Schumer said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “These are public institutions that deal with things like Social Security and Medicare and national defense, and provide for the well-being of the American people.”

“Whatever DOGE is doing, it is certainly not – not – what democracy looks like or has ever looked like in the grand history of this country,” the New York Democrat said.

Mr. Musk countered that Mr .Schumer “is mad that @DOGE is dismantling the radical-left shadow government in full view of the public.”

“This is our one chance to return power to the people from an unelected bureaucracy and back to democracy!!” he said.