Elon Musk shares Milton Freidman’s loathing of government bloat

Elon Musk and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy are already looking at what parts of the government could be slashed as they team up to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Tesla CEO on Wednesday pointed to famed economist Milton Friedman’s opinion from decades ago about how bloated the government had become.

“Milton Friedman was the best,” Musk wrote in a post on X, sharing an interview the late Nobel laureate gave, wherein he went through a list of entire federal agencies that should never have been created in the first place, as well as those that he felt were important.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during an America PAC town hall on Oct. 26, 2024, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

In the interview, Friedman was asked to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether certain agencies should be kept or abolished.

Friedman said the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Commerce Department should both be “gone,” right off the bat, but said the U.S. should keep in place its Department of Defense.

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He said the Department of Education should be abolished, as well as the Department of Energy, except for the parts that deal with nuclear, which should be moved under the Defense Department.

When asked about the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Friedman said “there is some room for public health activities to prevent the contagion,” but argued half of the agency should be eliminated.

The economist, who died in 2006, also said the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should also go, saying it “had done an enormous amount of harm.” 

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Friedman went on to say the Department of the Interior could remain in place until the federal government sells off all the land it owns – with the exception of the land its buildings sit on – and then it should also be scrapped.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman poses with a sculpture of himself in 1986. (George Rose/Getty Images / Getty Images)

The Department of Justice must remain, Friedman said in the interview, as well as the State Department and the Treasury, in order to collect taxes. But the Department of Labor and the Department of Transportation are both unnecessary, he said.

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Friedman said it is important to pay the salaries of those who have served in the armed forces, but the Department of Veterans Affairs need not exist for that to happen.

In his opinion, Friedman said, the federal government should be stripped down to its basic functions, which he said are to “preserve the peace, defend the country, [and] provide a mechanism whereby individuals can adjudicate their disputes.”