'Total transformation': How Musk and Ramaswamy plan to shake-up D.C.

let's bring in cnbc's senior Washington correspondent Aman Javers and David fenold investigative reporter for the New York Times okay aan you interviewed the fake ramaswami just yesterday for CNBC at the CFO Summit I want to play a little bit of what he told you a lot of the political philosophical musing about whether or not we should be cutting entitlements or not or whether or not the president can impound funds it's a deflection from the fact that there's a lot lower hanging fruit in terms of waste fraud abuse error program Integrity failures that you got to

go after first before we ever need to get to those harder political questions I'm so curious what was your sense because I think you talked to him for what like half an hour or something big picture of what the real goals of Doge are you know it's a total transformation and reinvention of the federal government in a much smaller size delivering much fewer services to much fewer people I mean that's sort of what he has in mind he's talking about a total transformation of the Way Washington DC does business and uh he wants to do

it with a lot less employees in the federal government you the question is whether he can achieve any of that these goals are are you know insanely ambitious by inside the Beltway standards right uh and they're going to run into opposition from members of Congress up on Capitol Hill as you say you know this panel that he's on is sort of an invented outside of government panel all they can do is make recommendations and the power of the purse under the Constitution is with Congress and there are Republican members MERS of the Appropriations committees uh

who are people who are you know entitled by the Constitution to actually set federal spending priorities who will not like to have Elon Musk and VI ramaswami telling them what to do right so they're going to run into some institutional problems right off the bat and I think that's what today on Capitol Hill is designed to sort of head off to the extent that they can yeah it is really interesting David uh Rosa doloro I think spoke for a lot of folks especially on the Democratic side she said that uh the Doge folks have zero

Authority it's a gang of two it's Congress that makes these determinations but we also know if they have the ear of Donald Trump their influence could be significant so my question is having two billionaires with influence over policy proposals that it could impact their own bottom lines their company's bottom lines obviously brings potential conflict of interest questions and I know you've spent a lot of time looking into the way the incoming Trump team is is treating disclosure and ethics requirements but I mean if if Rusk and RMA Swami aren't even government employees are there any

ethical guard rails it doesn't seem like there are and in fact you know one of the few sort of details we've gotten about what these folks want to do is from musk and when he talks about the kind of regulations he wants to cut he talks about regulations that directly affect his own businesses regulations that slow down his launches from SpaceX down in South Texas regulations that stop the boring company from building a tunnel it wants to build regulations that stop what uh Tesla's trying to do with with self-driving cars he feels like when he

talks about what's the government doing wrong it's slowing him down so yes he doesn't seem like he's recusing himself in those situations in fact they seem like the center of what he's trying to do so Aman on on Morning Joe this morning our friend former treasury official Steve Ratner added up uh some of musk and ramma Swami's proposed Cuts things they've talked about including elimination of entire programs VA healthc care um the the NIH FBI SEC but even cuts that drastic in many people's minds but only amount to $221 billion do they really think or

at least talking to to ramaswami does he really think that $2 trillion dollar worth of cuts is realistic you know he didn't commit to a lot when I talked to him yesterday he didn't commit to the $2 trillion figure I asked him for you know one example of one large thing North of10 billion do that he'd like to cut he wouldn't commit to any example there I asked him you know what guidance has Donald Trump given him about what Trump wants to cut from the federal budget he wouldn't put a specific on that either uh

you know I asked him about these conflicts of interest with Elon Musk in terms of Elon Musk uh either uh getting Federal contracts and deciding which contracts are then wasteful or not maybe his competitors are wasteful in his or not he didn't want to uh really address that directly and he didn't didn't want to address the question of whether Elon Musk has a conflict of interest in terms of China Elon does an enormous amount of business in China he's very critical of you know freedom of speech issues here in the United States but uh not

so much in China hasn't said a whole lot about freedom of speech in China right and so the question is if he's going to be serving in an Administration that is as anti-china as the Trump Administration says it wants to be you know are there conflicts of interest there ramas Swami kind of talked around that one as well so they're clearly not at a point now where they're will willing to put any detail on this at all and maybe that's behind closed doors what they're going to start to do up on Capitol Hill today it's

a very very tall order yeah and we're waiting to hear from them obvious obviously the podium is there we're waiting for them to show up but David musk and ramaswami have also been talking about a topic that could have brought popular support getting rid of a Daylight Savings Time musk actually wrote looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes ramma Swami responded it's inefficient and easy to change I mean I don't even know that's part of their purview uh nevertheless is it your sense that while the budget may be the central focus

of Doge the sky limit on potential influence well we're in a great period for them because they don't have any power yet they're not Trump's not in office there's there's nobody out there checking their power or telling them no so this is the time to sort of spitball and disguise the limit everything seems so easy so but I do think it's a little worrisome for me for them now that instead of focusing on okay we're going to cut waste out of Medicare through this step and this step in this step we're going to go off

the Pentagon and make sure its budget is audited this way instead of diving into the details that would actually lead them to their goal they're sort of going off on other tangents that you know while maybe popular don't really have anything to do with government efficiency what I want to see from them is are they serious are they serious enough to really dive under the weeds of these big Federal bureaucracies and find the waste forart and abuse or do they just want to tweet about it and so far it seems like they just want to

tweet about it e