Katie Miller will join the Trump administration’s much-watched non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, the president-elect announced on Sunday, where she will join Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in attempting to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal budget.
“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 the architects of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policies, who will serve as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy.
She previously served as press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence.
Musk and Trump have variously described DOGE’s plans as seeking between $500 million and $2 trillion in annual cuts to the federal budget.
The DOGE is not an actual department of the federal government, and its spending recommendations would need congressional approval to take effect.
The president-elect has compared the effort to the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, claiming it will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut 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 government subsidies for its Starlink internet 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 before reaching a last-minute deal to avert a government shutdown before Congress.
The conservative stalwarts at the Wall Street Journal editorial board claimed the recent “budget fiasco” sent “bad omens” for the year ahead.
