Among President-elect Trump's promises for his second term is a pledge to slash the size and spending of the federal government.

He's appointed Elon Musk, the world's richest man and Vivek Ramoswamy, a biotech company founder and former presidential candidate, to run an advisory commission to make that happen.

It's called the Department of Government Efficiency

or Doge for short, also seen as a nod to the Musk-backed cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

In an op-ed this week, the pair said that they're taking aim at $500 billion in annual spending,

but there are big questions about how and if they can reach that big goal.

Maya McGinnis watches federal spending and debt as the president of committee for a responsible

federal budget.

She joins me now.

Thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you.

So $500 billion was tossed out in this op-ed.

At one point, Elon Musk said cutting $2 trillion was sort of off the top of his head a number he was aiming for.

What would it take to meet those kinds of numbers?

Yeah, so I know that all these numbers are huge and it's sort of hard to put them in context,

but our federal budget is about seven trillion dollars a year.

And I still think that they're talking about that two trillion dollar number with serious purpose,

that that's what they're looking at.

And it would be unimaginable that we could find two trillion in two that $2 trillion number with serious purpose, that that's what they're looking at.

And it would be unimaginable that we could find $2 trillion in savings out of seven in one year.

That's at a lot of time.

Budget windows are 10 years.

...