Billionaire DOGE Insider Teases Musk's 'Really Bold' Plans To Drain Swamp: 'A Lot of Stuff Ready For Day One'

Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale expressed strong optimism for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative during his appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show. The Palantir co-founder highlighted the "very bold" reforms being planned by co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, revealing that the DOGE team is already hard at work on strategic priorities. With over 100 people on board, the team is preparing to enact immediate changes, including staff removals and regulatory rollbacks.

SHAWN RYAN: We're both pretty fired up about the [Trump administration]. Who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular?

JOE LONSDALE: I’m most excited about Elon, Vivek and the DOGE effort because this is something I've wanted to see for forever. I'm probably like one of the only guys in tech that's done a lot in policy on the right, on the small government side for the last 10-20 years, and it's like the world just shifted this way—like the vibe shift is exactly in line with stuff I've been thinking and talking about for a decade. I'm so excited about this.

SHAWN RYAN: How fast do you think they're going to start cleaning this stuff up?

JOE LONSDALE: They're already doing it, man. They can't really officially do it yet, but they're already making all the plans. There's people working hard there. There's guys picking me, 'Joe, we need another engineer for this,' 'We're trying to map this out,' 'We need more lawyers for this. They're going right now as hard as they can and getting ready. It's going to be really bold.

I think the way Elon works in general is just like, "What can we do right now, and then what can we do next? Let's just focus on what we can do right now." So they have what's called their 'Day One priorities,' and they're just focusing and sprinting on everything they could do day one. I think they're going to have a lot of stuff ready for day one.

They're bringing in at least well over 100 people for the DOGE effort, and they're going to put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs. There's these policy placements that are all working with DOGE and being liaisons with DOGE. They're going to come out of the gate with a bunch of general things—removing certain people, removing certain regulations. I can't go into the details exactly of what they're going to be doing, but it's going to be really aggressive right from the start."

Meanwhile, Lonsdale stressed the need to rebuild America's manufacturing base.

"I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base that's nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective it's extremely dangerous and if we want to be ready—so in World War II it wasn't that we had like a bunch of big defense contractors that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war."

"If we've basically gotten rid of a lot of that base and we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think Trump is very good on this; he shifted it back. I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country where a lot of people on both sides now agree we need to fix this. But this is where the tariffs against China, if they're done correctly, are not totally insane at all. It makes a lot of sense to me," he continued.