Musk tells Trump ‘I can’t wait’ to drain the DC swamp

Tech titan and Trump supporter Elon Musk confirmed his interest on Tuesday in helping the former president drain the swamp of “needless” regulators and regulations considered by Republicans as drags on the economy .

“I can’t wait . There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go,” he said in one post on his social media platform X.

In another post, he agreed it is time to “shrink the government.”

Former President Donald Trump is considering plans to supercharge his earlier efforts to rein in regulations and regulators and cut the bureaucratic “swamp” in Washington, according to reports.

New reports have suggested he would like to create a commission led by CEOs that would highlight government programs and regulations for elimination. And there is talk already that Musk would have a leading role in such a commission.

While there were the usual snarky comments on X about giving Musk any role, deregulation experts said a prominent leader taking on government regulation would be a positive.

“I like this,” Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said. Crews has been calling for tighter restrictions on regulating agencies for years. He recently proposed an “Office of No” to tackle overregulation.

In recent congressional testimony and blog posts, Crews said the Biden administration has abandoned oversight of regulators and instead is pushing agencies to produce more red tape because it can’t get Congress to OK the president’s regulations agenda.

Crews and other deregulation experts said that as a result, agencies, such as the Office of Management and Budget, have given up on policing regulations, a huge shift from the Trump administration that required two rules be killed for every new one allowed.

“Now that OMB has evaporated as a watchdog and now is a regulatory promoter, there needs to be an ‘Office of No' function in the administration,” Crews told Secrets on Tuesday.

He said the goal of Trump’s project would be to disrupt regulation. “With putting business leaders in certain roles, that takes everything up to a new level, potentially, but they must challenge the premises of the 100-plus-year-old Administrative State,” he said.

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He added that the panel would also have to be watched to make sure it wasn’t targeting its foes.

“Trump would have to take extreme caution to ensure that the CEOs involved are actually disentangling from the federal enterprise, not tying new knots. That means that it is necessary that they call for abolishing agencies and ending business subsidies,” Crews said.