The initial plan for retooling the federal government under President Trump started with three loyal billionaires: the banker Howard Lutnick, the tech leader Elon Musk and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now, it’s down to one.
Mr. Lutnick emerged as Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Commerce Department. Mr. Ramaswamy decided to step aside from the project just before Mr. Trump assumed office on Monday.
As a result, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, now has full command of the federal cost-cutting effort, which Mr. Trump has hailed as “potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” How exactly Mr. Musk wields his consolidated power to set the tempo and targets of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency remains to be seen. But his first moves suggest he will oversee something closer to an I.T. project than the sweeping operation to slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget that Mr. Musk had once predicted.
The Musk-led project debuted this week with a bit of bureaucratic jujitsu: the takeover of an existing arm of the White House that, for the past decade, had focused on improving government technology. The office, the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, was created in 2014 to fix failing computer systems that threatened the success of President Barack Obama’s health insurance overhaul.
Mr. Musk, who cut 80 percent of the jobs at Twitter after he bought the social media company two years ago, aims to conduct a review of at least some of the roughly 200 employees who work in the office before deciding whether to keep them in their jobs, according to two people familiar with his plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal plans.
From this new perch in the administration, Mr. Musk immediately gains a road map to the federal bureaucracy, which could allow him to swiftly assess the technological capacities of agencies and departments and identify potential changes. He is also expected to maintain an office in the West Wing, which will help him keep crucial access to Mr. Trump and key White House aides. Mr. Musk’s allies, meanwhile, have secured key posts in the administration. Amanda Scales, who until this month worked at Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is now chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, a powerful agency that oversees government hiring.