Trump faucets Katie Miller, spouse of key aide Stephen Miller, for Musk’s DOGE panel | EUROtoday

Katie Miller will be part of the Trump administration’s much-watched non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, the president-elect introduced on Sunday, the place she is going to be part of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in trying to chop lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from the federal funds.

“She has been a loyal supporter of mine for many years, and will bring her professional experience to Government Efficiency,” Trumpwrote on Truth Social. “Katie is a deeply experienced communications professional respected by all. Congratulations to Stephen and Katie!”

Miller is married to immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, one of many architects of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” household separation insurance policies, who will function Trump’s deputy chief of employees for coverage.

She beforehand served as press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence.

Musk and Trump have variously described DOGE’s plans as in search of between $500 million and $2 trillion in annual cuts to the federal funds.

The DOGE shouldn’t be an precise division of the federal authorities, and its spending suggestions would want congressional approval to take impact.

The president-elect has in contrast the trouble to the Manhattan Project to construct the atomic bomb, claiming it would “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash extra laws, lower wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America; Movement.”

The DOGE team, which duplicates existing government anti-waste and fraud efforts within the Government Accountability Office and Office of Management and Budget, has singled out the Internal Revenue Service, Planned Parenthood, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and federal employees who work from home as targets for its planned cuts.

The effort puts Musk in particular in a complicated and unprecedented position, as both the richest man in the world, a central presidential adviser, and a businessman with an estimated $15.4 billion in federal government contracts over the last decade across companies like Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk has clashed with a variety of federal agencies he might now slash, ranging from highway regulators investigating Tesla after crashes, to accusing the Federal Communications Commission of “contemptible political lawfare,” after it determined SpaceX wasn’t eligible for $900 million in authorities subsidies for its Starlink web program.

Despite talks of a corresponding DOGE caucus and House subcommittee forming in caucus, observers have raised alarms over the Trump-Musk coalition’s ineffectual governance, after Congress twice rejected Trump- or Musk-backed spending proposals earlier than reaching a last-minute deal to avert a authorities shutdown earlier than Congress.

The conservative stalwarts on the Wall Street Journal editorial board claimed the latest “budget fiasco” despatched “bad omens” for the yr forward.