By: Steve Hallstrom
WASHINGTON – North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer is assessing the first 30 days of Donald Trump’s second presidential term.
So far, he likes what he sees.
“Well, it’s been great from my perspective,” said Cramer, in an interview with WDAY Radio/AM 1100 The Flag prior to Kash Patel being confirmed as FBI Director on February 20. “In the United States Senate, we just confirmed our 18th cabinet official, which is, which is well ahead of the most previous two administrations, and of course, the first Trump administration. And it’s been fun to watch the leadership of John Thune working with President Trump as part of that record pace. And with Kash Patel, for FBI director, we’ll be at 19.”
There are 15 Presidential Cabinet positions, with only Linda McMahon (Education Secretary) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Labor Secretary) left to be confirmed.
McMahon passed the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee on February 20, moving her confirmation process to the full Senate. The panel voted 12-11 along party lines to approve McMahon and it’s almost certain she’ll be confirmed in the full Senate vote, as Republicans carry a majority in that chamber, and none have made any public objections to her nomination. Chavez-DeRemer had her first hearing on Wednesday, February 19th but has not yet had a committee vote.
In all, the U.S. Senate will vote on more than 1,200 individuals hoping to play a role in Trump’s second presidency. That number, Cramer says, needs to decrease.
“It’s too many,” said Cramer. “And I think we should eliminate some of that, quite honestly. And it’s not even as many as it used to be but just take as an example; there’s a lot of Undersecretaries and all the Deputy Secretaries, there are acquisition officers, and research and development personnel. Then of course there are a couple real big ones; all the ambassadors throughout the world. You get the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and then Deputy Secretary of State. And of course, judges, district judges, federal district judges, and the circuit judges that make up the appellate courts. And then, of course, the Supreme Court when there’s an occasional opening for justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. So yeah, it all adds up to about 1,200. As Mitch McConnell often reminded us in years past, we are in the personnel business.”
Donald Trump, on the 2024 campaign trail, promised a major shakeup of the federal establishment if he were to be elected. He has not disappointed. In the first 30 days of his presidency, his administration has taken a sledgehammer to the status quo, firing thousands of federal employees via its DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency) efforts, led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In addition to the staff maneuvers, DOGE has identified tens of billions of dollars in what it deems fraudulent or wasteful spending.
This list of federal cost-cutting has been met with celebration from the Republican Party’s fiscal hawks and hostility from Democrats who maintain Musk should not have the ability to access federal records and make important financial decisions.
Political observers say the cost-cutting efforts have been historic, but some say it’s too much and too fast.
“I think there are a lot of conservatives who have a similar mixed feeling about it,” said Cramer. “There’s a discomfort, first of all, because most of us would probably have considered Elon Musk a moderate, if not a liberal, not that terribly long ago. But I think this is representative of the wide swath that Donald Trump has cut politically in this country. When you look at the way labor has come his way, the way black male voters have come his way. I mean, (laughs) for crying out loud, we just confirmed a director of National Intelligence who, a few months ago, was a Democrat, and a couple years ago was even a Democratic member of Congress. We confirmed a Health and Human service secretary in RFK Junior, who, not long ago was a Democratic candidate for president of the United States and the son of Robert F. Kennedy. I think the other thing it illustrates is that this is populism versus conservatism. There’s also the sort of constitutional separation of powers that are being challenged. Now, having said all that, I’m very excited about it. I think that this is, this is a generational change for our party, and I don’t love all of it, Steve, but it is generational.”
Musk was one of the more unexpected stories of the 2024 Presidential campaign, changing his party support after publicly acknowledging he voted for Barack Obama twice, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. In 2021, Musk became publicly critical of Biden’s “Build Back Better” initiative; a $3.5 trillion legislative package that ultimately failed in Congress. By 2022, in the midst of an attempted purchase of Twitter (which later succeeded), Musk fired back at Democrats who he felt were increasingly adversarial toward him, his Tesla Corporation, and his views on free speech. He stated publicly in May of 2022, “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”
He initially supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ bid for the Republican nomination, but shifted his allegiance toward Trump as the former President began surging his way toward the party’s nomination.
Musk’s personal net worth was recently estimated, by Forbes, to be approximately $384 billion. He became the largest individual donor in the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump, increasingly more publicly supportive of Musk’s talents, offered him an advisory role in the campaign. In late 2024, the concept of DOGE began to circulate, and Trump suggested that Musk, along with fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, could lead a historic cost-cutting effort that could root out what he called “wasteful and fraudulent” government spending. Ramaswamy has since stepped away from the Trump administration, as the Associated Press reported on Inauguration Day that Ramaswamy intends to run for political office and could not be involved.
Upon inauguration, Trump issued an executive order creating DOGE and designating Musk as a “special government employee.” Musk is considered a senior advisor to the president, but according to a sworn White House statement, Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.
Cramer says the role of “special government employee” was established more than a half-century ago.
“It’s a role that Congress authorized in 1960’s. So, it comes with the same ethics standards as any federal employee, and it has to avoid conflicts of interest. The president has been very clear that where there might be a conflict of interest — and you’ve maybe heard me say that there needs to be guardrails — but where there might be a conflict of interest, he simply recuses himself. So, he’s no different than any other federal employee other than he’s the richest man in the world. But what he does do is bring in significant areas of expertise. One is, of course, he’s a businessperson. So, like any financial executive, he looks at the bottom line, he looks at expenditures, he looks at balance sheets, he looks at profit and loss statements. He looks for efficiencies. And more importantly, he’s got the technical brain to know them when he sees them, or to work with his team on software that can identify peculiarities in a spreadsheet or in a government program. And that’s what has served him really, really well. And I would say that now it’s served all of us really, really well.”
The DOGE effort has been the biggest story of Trump’s second administration. In just the first month of operation, it claims to have already exposed more than $50 billion of unnecessary government spending, and some proponents of DOGE say the impact of the potential cuts could save the federal government more than $130 billion over the next four years.
But does Musk, or DOGE, have the authority to cancel federal contracts? Cramer says no.
“He has no authority. A lot of people say, ‘well, he is unelected, but he’s cutting budgets.’ No, he is not. He’s strictly a consultant to the rest of the administration that then looks at his findings and then makes the decisions on whether to stop or put a pause on U-S-A-I-D, for example, until they can look further into it or dismiss a number of employees with a certain status knowing full well that we probably don’t need all of those employees. But he doesn’t make those decisions. He makes those recommendations, presents his findings, and then the people in the appropriate positions make those. So that’s why I don’t get quite as worked up as some, but it’s good that we’ve raised questions over the last couple of weeks relating to appropriate guardrails and separation of powers.”
And to those who would sound the alarm that the new president is being disruptive to the federal government, Cramer says that’s actually the point.
“Let’s make no mistake, I mean…There is certainly no place in the Constitution that says the executive branch is to have however many million people; there’s one executive named in the executive in the Constitution, and that’s the president of the United States. So, to this point, I’m strongly supportive of the trend here. Elon Musk puts a spotlight on it with his personality in this DOGE thing. And everybody’s hair is on fire in this town, and I love that as well. He and DOGE are performing an incredible service, even though they don’t necessarily have the authority to cut budgets. But they provide a lot of cover, so I think it’s a great service to the country.”
