Vivek Ramaswamy, who is co-lead of President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory group, said today that DOGE’s success hinges on the need to modernize technology across the Federal government.
Ramaswamy and businessman Elon Musk were tapped by President-elect Trump to lead DOGE – which has a mission to find ways to reduce government spending and potentially do away with any number of government operations.
“Technology improvements across the Federal government are not only going to be important, [but also] necessary in order to actually get the job done,” Ramaswamy said during the Aspen Security Forum in D.C. today.
“A basic modernization of the software, of the technology, of the rails on which the Federal government’s information actually flows – it has low hanging fruit that I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat, it’s going to strictly improve the effectiveness with which the taxpayer dollar is actually spent,” he said.
Ramaswamy, who mounted his own 2024 Republican presidential campaign earlier this year, said that the Federal government’s low hanging fruit includes data silos.
“Going to compare whether or not you have excess spending or waste, fraud, abuse by comparing different databases – often you can’t do that because that information is siloed in different houses, in different parts of the Federal bureaucracy,” he explained. “They don’t talk to each other; they don’t even operate on the same kind of code; they don’t operate even according to some of the same enterprise systems.”
In a similar vein, Ramaswamy said the Federal government needs to modernize its technology by synchronizing its IT systems.
“The same kinds of software that can be compatible with other kinds of software that are being used in a part of the Federal government that’s working on a similar problem, but because it’s in a different silo, isn’t even using compatible software,” he explained. “COBOL on mainframes is basically the norm in a lot of the Federal government today. I may be overstating the case on that, but not by a lot.”
Ramaswamy said DOGE plans to use AI to advance its mission but emphasized that he is “resisting the AI illusion” and not following in the Federal government’s footsteps of “fetishizing the tool” at a time when the government has “a lot lower hanging fruit” for IT modernization.
“I hope that’s why our success is going to be one that isn’t a partisan victory, but it’s something that goes beyond traditional politics to say that we’re actually making government function more efficiently and effectively,” the DOGE co-lead said. “And as a result, it turns out that we have to spend a lot less money, we need a lot fewer bureaucrats doing it, and we restore that sense of civic accountability and revival where people feel like the government is actually responsive to them.”
DOGE has said that it is aiming to complete the panel’s work by July 4, 2026 – the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
President-elect Trump in September announced the DOGE-driven plan, and said he wanted to see recommendations for “drastic reforms,” starting with hunting down fraud and improper payments, that would target “the entire federal government.”
