Business

Column: Not satisfied with schools, book banners are now targeting adults’ right to read

Published

1 year ago

October 4, 2023

Column: Not satisfied with schools, book banners are now targeting adults’ right to read

It’s Banned Books Week, the American Library Assn.’s annual observance of attacks on freedom of speech and the freedom to read, and the news is not good.

Over the last year, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, what has been most striking is the pivot of censorship advocates from books in school libraries to books in public libraries.

“Last year, about 16% of demands to remove books involved public libraries,” Caldwell-Stone says. “This year, to date, it’s 49%.”

We’re seeing groups go to school or library board meetings to demand the removal of multiple titles all at once — 25, 50, 100 titles or more, often based on lists they get from advocacy groups on social media.

— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, American Library Assn.

That’s a sea change, she told me, because “public libraries are the places that we’ve created for freewheeling inquiry, for the marketplace of ideas. Demands to remove books because they don’t comport with someone’s beliefs or their political or religious agenda are attacks on the very thought of a library as a place that protects 1st amendment rights to access a wide variety of views.”

These amount to demands that “the government tell us what to read, what to think, what to believe,” she says.

Other than that, not much has changed in the last year about demands for censorship of material accessible in public, except for two things.

First, there’s more of it: This year through Aug. 31, the ALA has tracked 695 attempts to remove or otherwise restrict access to library materials, aimed at 1,915 titles. That’s an increase of 20% in the number of titles challenged, making 2023 a high-water mark in a database that dates back 20 years.

The association says most of the challenges concerned books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

The second change is that a backlash has been gaining strength among parents and others who don’t want their kids or themselves deprived of access to books because fringe members of their communities want to impose their beliefs or political ideologies on everyone else.

It’s a “multi-pronged” fight, says Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, the advocacy group for writers, readers and free expression generally, waged in court and state legislatures as well as before city, county, school and library boards.

“Overwhelmingly, Americans reject book bans,” Nossel says. “They know this is not the concept of free speech that we all are raised with and that we are proud of. When they point out that students have rights and that ‘parents’ rights’ are not just the rights of a single individual who may be objecting, but the rights of the overwhelming majority of parents who want their children to have the freedom to read, they can assert themselves and get these bans reversed.”

California last month became the second state to ban book bans in public schools, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a measure imposing financial penalties on districts that ban textbooks portraying LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups.

The law was partially in response to a right wing-dominated school board in Temecula, which tried to reject curriculum materials that mentioned slain gay leader Harvey Milk. The law allows the state to override a board and provide the materials to students at the district’s expense.

The first-in-the-nation measure outlawing book bans was signed in June by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. That law strips public libraries of state funding if they restrict or ban materials for “partisan or doctrinal reasons.”

I should declare a personal perspective here. We read with our kids every night when they were growing up — Narnia, yes, but also “Huckleberry Finn,” unexpurgated, and never discouraged them from reading anything on their own. They grew into smart, knowledgeable, inquisitive adults.

When I was in school, we knew families that imposed stringent limitations on what their kids could read or watch, but we found them peculiar. None of them sought to impose their practices on anyone else, however — the defining characteristic of today’s book banners.

Things began to change in the 1970s. In that period, the school board in a district neighboring the one I grew up in, following along with a right-wing parents organization, ordered nine books removed from its secondary school libraries as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy.”

The board was slapped down by the Supreme Court in a landmark 1982 opinion finding that decisions to remove books once they had been acquired could not be “exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner,” as was the case there. That was the last time the court ruled on a book ban, and it remains binding precedent.

Defenders of book-banning often conceal their points behind a scrim of rhetorical hair-splitting or other pettifoggery. After the Florida Department of Education (possibly the most misleadingly-named government agency in the United States) released a list of 300 books removed from school library shelves in 2022, a spokeswoman for the department declared, “Florida does not ban books.”

It’s a challenge to parse her statement, since she explained that “the list comprises information provided by each school district of the books they removed based on objections from a parent or resident of the county using their district’s process.” Perhaps she meant to say that Florida does not ban books — Floridians do.

Then there’s Matthew Walther, a Catholic functionary who tried, in a New York Times essay originally titled, “This Is Why I Hate Banned Books Week,” to define opposition to book bans as some sort of performative liberal moralism — “See how brave we are, inviting people to read these daring books!” is how he boorishly characterizes the opposition’s motivation.

(The Times changed the headline, without explanation, to “The Enemies of Literature Are Winning,” which seems to be utterly contrary to the point the author was making.)

Having named two LGBTQ+-themed books that have risen to the top of the banned-book lists recently, Walther wrote: “In zero cases since the advent of Banned Books Week has a local or state ordinance been passed in this country that forbids the sale or general possession of any of the books in question.”

This is slicing the baloney mighty thin; nor does it say much for the reading comprehension or research skills of Walther or his editors. “Gender Queer” and “Flamer,” the two books he names with LGBTQ+ content, both appear on the Florida list of books forcibly removed from school shelves.

Don’t be fooled by assertions by advocates for bans that they’re only trying to protect children from “pornography” or “inappropriate” content. These terms typically are written into laws or policies without defining them. Notwithstanding Walther’s assertion that no laws or statutes name any of the books removed from shelves, he can’t be unaware that the laws don’t have to name any specific materials for their drafters’ intentions to be crystal clear.

Arkansas Act 372, enacted this year, imposes criminal liability on librarians and booksellers who make “inappropriate” books “accessible” to minors, or in some cases even adults, without defining those terms. A federal judge blocked key provisions of the law in July, calling them “fatally vague.”

The ambiguity is the point, of course. “The incentive it creates for educators is to err on the side of caution by avoiding anything that might be the tripwire,” Nossel says. “Teachers are operating in a climate of intimidation.”

One aspect of book-banning that has remained a constant in recent years is the reactionary partisan program behind it.

The book banners are characteristically Republican rightists or Republican-adjacent. Their goal is to inculcate schoolchildren or their communities with a wholly imaginary picture of a bygone America in which Black or LGBTQ+ people didn’t exist in mainstream society, so their concerns could be safely ignored.

One trend noticed by free-speech advocates — the real ones fighting book bans, not the fake ones such as Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, a narrow-minded, opportunistic troll who masquerades as a free-speech guardian — is that the traditional model in which individuals targeted an individual title here or there has yielded to armies of activists who come to school district or libraries bearing the names of books by the ream.

In the old days, says Caldwell-Stone, a parent might find his or her child reading a book, look it over, and bring a concern to a teacher or librarian.

“Now we’re seeing groups go to school or library board meetings and demanding the removal of multiple titles all at once — 25, 50, 100 titles or more, often based on lists they get from advocacy groups on social media,” she says.

“It’s not really an authentic parental concern about a book,” she adds, “but an advocacy group going after a set of books that they don’t believe should be available to the public because they disagree with their viewpoint or that highlight the lives or voices of groups that have been systematically marginalized in our society.” Often, the objectors haven’t read the books.

Boards, principals or librarians reasonably concerned about their jobs or careers sense that they have no choice but to capitulate until they have a chance to review every title, which can take many months. In the meantime, the books are inaccessible, which is the banners’ goal.

If there’s a glimmer of hope in this dismal landscape, it’s that judges have been consistently hostile to these campaigns. Rulings have been piling up, especially in federal court, invalidating book bans and ordering challenged material back on the shelves on grounds that their removal violated the 1st Amendment or users’ rights to due process.

In March, a federal judge in Texas ordered a county library board dominated by a hand-picked right-wing cabal to replace 12 books that they had removed from the shelves and from the system’s catalog so patrons would know they were in the library and could find them.

In 2020, another Texas federal judge invalidated an ordinance enacted in the city of Wichita Falls that allowed books to be removed from the public library if petitions with 300 signatures demanded their removal. The city has more than 100,000 residents. The original targets of the rules were the children’s books “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate,” which depicted families headed by same-sex couples.

In 2003, an Arkansas federal judge invalidated a local school district’s rule that the Harry Potter books could only be lent from the school library to students who presented a written permission slip from a parent; the books had been challenged by a local pastor and his church members for promoting “witchcraft.”

Book banners have turned to taking other steps that may not be reviewable in the courts. A public library in Virginia is facing extinction this year because a small group of activists objecting to LGBTQ+ material on its shelves goaded their county Board of Supervisors to cut off funding that covers 75% of its budget.

A library in rural Michigan has faced the same threat. Taxpayers in its conservative county have twice voted down funding that accounts for 84% of its budget, again over LGBTQ+-themed books. The library has offered to paste descriptions of the books’ content onto their inside covers, hoping that that will mollify residents enough to approve the funding in a November vote.

There are few indications yet that the wave of book bans will ebb any time soon — not until defenders of free speech stand up to defend their school and public libraries against a minority cabal that believes that medieval standards of learning and knowledge should be the model for American society.

Banned Books Week should be a reminder that such notions can only thrive if the rest of us fight against them — and not only for one week every year, but every day and every week.

Business

How Poshmark Is Trying to Make Resale Work Again

Published

3 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

How Poshmark Is Trying to Make Resale Work Again

Lauren Eager got into thrifting in high school. It was a way to find cheap, interesting clothes while not contributing to the wastefulness of fast fashion.

In 2015, in her first year of college, she downloaded the app for Poshmark, a kind of Instagram-meets-eBay resale platform. Soon, she was selling as well as buying clothes.

This was the golden age of online reselling. In addition to Poshmark, companies like ThredUp and Depop had sprung up, giving a second life to old clothes. In 2016, Facebook debuted Marketplace. Even Goodwill got into the action, starting a snazzy website.

The platforms tapped into two consumer trends: buying stuff online and the never-gets-old delight of snagging a gently used item for a fraction of the original cost. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as people cleaned out their closets, enthusiasm for reselling intensified. It was so strong that Poshmark decided to go public. On the day of its initial public offering in January 2021, the company’s market value peaked at $7.4 billion, roughly the same as PVH’s, the company that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, at the time.

Then, the business of old clothes started to fray.

Using the Poshmark app, Ms. Eager and others said, started to feel like trying to find something in a messy closet. The app was cluttered with features that did not work or that she did not use, and it felt “spammy,” she said, sending too many push notifications.

Many platforms found selling used items hard to scale. Now, online resellers are trying to recalibrate. Last year, ThredUp decided to exit Europe and focus on selling in the United States. Trove, a company that helps brands like Canada Goose and Steve Madden resell their goods, purchased a competitor, Recurate. The RealReal, a luxury consignor, appointed a new chief executive as the company tried to improve profitability.

Poshmark is undergoing perhaps the biggest reinvention. In 2023, Naver, South Korea’s biggest search engine as well as an online marketplace, bought the company in a deal valued at $1.6 billion, less than half its IPO price.

Something of a mash-up of Google and Amazon, Naver is betting it can rebuild Poshmark, which has 130 million active users, with the same technology that made Naver dominant in its own country.

It may also help breathe new life into the resale market. Analysts think the resale fashion market still has room to grow in the United States, with revenue expected to increase 26 percent to $36.3 billion by 2028, according to the retail consultancy firm Coresight Research.

New legislation in California could help. The law, passed last year, requires brands and retailers that operate in the state and generate at least $1 million to set up a “producer responsibility organization” to collect and then reuse, repair or recycle its products. Resale platforms like ThredUp and Poshmark could be in a position to help brands carry out that mandate.

At the moment, though, Naver’s focus for Poshmark is more basic: Make it a better place to sell and shop. The company has the “operating know-how” to do that, said Philip Lee, a founder of the media outlet The Pickool, which covers both South Korean and U.S. tech companies.

“They’re trying to renovate Poshmark and then expand the market share,” he said.

A Marriage of Search and Commerce

Poshmark, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, an entrepreneur and former tech executive, and three others. In trying to expand, Poshmark faced a problem common to resellers: Capturing the excitement of the secondhand-shopping treasure hunt while not frustrating buyers with an endless scroll. The company knew it needed better search, as well as interactive elements that gave people more reasons to come beyond paying $19 for a J. Crew sweater.

For its part, Naver was looking for ways to push beyond South Korea, where its commerce and search businesses were already mature. The growing online resale market in the United States presented an opportunity, and also gave the company access to the largest consumer market in the world.

“Commerce is a big growth engine for us,” Namsun Kim, Naver’s chief financial officer, said. And the peer-to-peer sector, where users sell to one another, was still in its infancy, with room to expand. But, Mr. Kim added, “it’s a more challenging segment, and that’s why it’s harder for a lot of the larger players to enter.”

There are two common business models for resale: peer-to-peer and consignment. With consignment, a platform collects and redistributes physical goods. Poshmark uses the peer-to-peer model, which relies on scores of people — many of them novices — haggling over prices and then mailing items to one another. This decentralization can be a headache for brands, which like to maintain a certain level of control of their products. And platforms like Poshmark must make buyers comfortable with trusting the sellers on their site.

Before the Naver purchase, it was difficult to push through needed technological changes, said Vanessa Wong, the vice president of product at Poshmark.

“I would always talk to my engineers and ask, ‘What if we do this or do that?’ They’re like, ‘That’s hard. The effort’s really high,’” Ms. Wong said.

Naver’s purchase offered both the investment and the expertise to pull off the changes. Founded in 1999, the company is everywhere in South Korea.

“We are not just a simple search technology or A.I. service,” said Soo-yeon Choi, the chief executive of Naver, whose headquarters are near Seoul. The company, she said, “alleviates the frustrations of people, which is what is needed to help growth.”

Search built Naver “into the massive power that they are in Korea,” said Mr. Chandra, who stayed on as chief executive after Naver’s purchase. It was the top priority when the company bought Poshmark.

Several new elements for users and sellers have been introduced. With a tool called Posh Lens, users can take a photo of an item and, using Naver’s machine-learning technology, the site populates listings that are the same or similar to the shoe or tank top that they’re searching for. A paid ad feature for sellers called “Promoted Closet,” pushes listings higher on customer feeds.

Poshmark also introduced live shows, some of which are themed, to draw in the TikTok generation and increase engagement. One party auctioned off clothing previously worn by South Korean celebrities, a connection that was made with the help of Naver.

Still, the resale market is going through growing pains and has not quite found its footing since the height of the pandemic. It’s not clear whether the changes taking place at Poshmark will be enough. In May, Mr. Kim, Naver’s finance chief, said in an earnings call that Poshmark’s profitability was improving, but by November, the company was cautioning that growth had slowed because of weakness in the peer-to-peer resale market in North America.

Missteps and Reinvention

The company has already done some backpedaling on unpopular decisions.

In October, Poshmark introduced a new fee structure, which increased costs for buyers. Sellers, fearing that higher costs would make consumers bolt, revolted. Within weeks, the company scrapped the new fee structure.

And there are still user headaches: tags and keywords that help users find what they’re looking for can be miscategorized. Sellers sometimes tag their products incorrectly to get more eyeballs on their less popular products. (Hard-to-offload Amazon leggings, for example, may be listed as Free People apparel.)

The company is beta testing changes with its frequent sellers — people like Alex Mahl, who sells thousands of dollars in apparel on the site each year. And within dedicated Facebook groups related to Poshmark, there’s a lot of chatter about the changes that sellers and buyers would still like to see.

“The only way for it to do well is there’s going to be constant changes,” Ms. Mahl said about the tweaks on Poshmark. “If you were just on an app that never changed — one, it would be boring, and two, the opportunity to just do better wouldn’t be there.”

One recent morning, Ms. Eager, the seller who joined Poshmark back in college, was pleasantly surprised to find that the app had some new features she actually liked. She snapped a photo of her Aerie gray tank top with Posh Lens. Within seconds, the app populated listings of similar products. It was so much better than conjuring up the adjectives needed to describe it.

“Love it,” Ms. Eager exclaimed.

Business

When receipts of home renovations are lost, is the tax break gone too?

Published

5 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

When receipts of home renovations are lost, is the tax break gone too?

Dear Liz: I have sold my family home recently after almost 50 years. I had done lots of improvements throughout those years. Due to a fire 15 years ago, all the documentation for these improvements has been destroyed. How do I document the improvements for the capital gains tax calculation?

Answer: As you probably know, you can exclude $250,000 of capital gains from the sale of a principal residence as long as you own and live in the home at least two of the previous five years. The exclusion is $500,000 for a couple.

Once upon a time, that meant few homeowners had to worry about capital gains taxes on the sale of their home. But the exclusion amounts haven’t changed since they were created in 1997, even as home values have soared. Qualifying home improvements can be used to increase your tax basis in the home and thus decrease your tax bill, but the IRS probably will demand proof of those changes should you be audited.

You could ask any contractors you used who are still in business if they will provide written verification of the work they performed, suggests Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. You also could check your home’s history with your property tax assessor to see if its assessment was adjusted to reflect any of the improvements.

At a minimum, prepare a list from memory of the improvements you made, including the year and the approximate cost. If you don’t have pictures of the house reflecting the changes, perhaps friends and relatives might. This won’t be the best evidence, Luscombe concedes, but it might get the IRS to accept at least some increase in your tax basis.

If you’re a widow or widower, there’s another tax break you should know about. At least part of your home would have gotten a step-up in tax basis if you were married and your co-owner spouse died. In most states, the half owned by the deceased spouse would get a new tax basis reflecting the home’s current market value. In community property states such as California, both halves of the house get this step-up. A tax pro can provide more details.

Other homeowners should take note of the importance of keeping good digital records. While documents may not be lost in a fire, they may be misplaced, accidentally discarded or (in the case of receipts) so faded they’re illegible. To make sure documents are available when you need them, consider scanning or taking photographs of your records and keeping multiple copies, such as one set in your computer and another in a secure cloud account.

When an employee is misclassified as contractor

Dear Liz: A parent recently wrote to you about a son who was being paid as a contractor. I know someone else who got a job that did not “take out taxes from his paycheck.” Such workers believe they are pocketing more money, but unfortunately, too many do not know about the nature of withholding. They only learn if they choose to file for their expected refund, but instead discover an exorbitant tax liability that a paycheck-to-paycheck worker cannot pay.

The sad fact is that many of these employers improperly classify their workers, who are truly employees, as independent contractors! And they do this to avoid paying their own portion of Social Security and unemployment taxes and also workers compensation insurance.

If workers believe that they have been misclassified (the IRS website provides all criteria), they can file IRS Form SS-8 and Form 8919, which will allow them to pay only their allocated half of their Social Security taxes. Hopefully the IRS will then contact these employers to correct their wrong classifications. And finally, it should be a law that, when hired, all true independent contractors should be given a clear form (not fine print on their employment agreements) that informs them of their status and the need to make estimated tax payments.

Answer: A big factor in determining whether a worker is an employee or contractor is control. Who controls what the worker does and how the worker does the job? The more control that’s in the employer’s hands, the more likely the worker is an employee.

However, the IRS notes that there are no hard and fast rules and that “factors which are relevant in one situation may not be relevant in another.”

The form you mentioned, IRS Form SS-8, also can be filed by any employer unsure if a worker is properly classified.

Liz Weston, Certified Financial Planner®, is a personal finance columnist. Questions may be sent to her at 3940 Laurel Canyon, No. 238, Studio City, CA 91604, or by using the “Contact” form at asklizweston.com.

Business

Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs

Published

15 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs

An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.

As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.

After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.

This story is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.

But parts of the operation are becoming clear: Many of the executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Mr. Musk has said they will not be paid — a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives — and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks. Some, including possibly Mr. Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.

The representatives will largely be stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials, DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy.

“The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naïve billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation,” said Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration with associates who have considered joining DOGE.

“The friends I know have huge lives,” Mr. Traina said, “and they’re agreeing to work for free for six months, and leave their families and roll up their sleeves in an attempt to really turn things around. You can view it either way.”

DOGE leaders have told others that the minority of people not detailed to agencies would be housed within the Executive Office of the President at the U.S. Digital Service, which was created in 2014 by former President Barack Obama to “change our government’s approach to technology.”

DOGE is also expected to have an office in the Office of Management and Budget, and officials have also considered forming a think tank outside the government in the future.

Mr. Musk’s friends have been intimately involved in choosing people who are set to be deployed to various agencies. Those who have conducted interviews for DOGE include the Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Shaun Maguire, Baris Akis and others who have a personal connection to Mr. Musk. Some who have received the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious grant funded by Mr. Thiel given to those who promise to skip or drop out of college to become entrepreneurs, are involved with programming and operations for DOGE. Brokering an introduction to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy, or their inner circles, has been a key way for leaders to be picked for deployment.

That is how the co-founder of Loom, Vinay Hiremath, said he became involved in DOGE in a rare public statement from someone who worked with the entity. In a post this month on his personal blog, Mr. Hiremath described the work that DOGE employees have been doing before he decided against moving to Washington to join the entity.

“After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work,” he wrote. “The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.”

These recruits are assigned to specific agencies where they are thought to have expertise. Some other DOGE enrollees have come to the attention of Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy through X. In recent weeks, DOGE’s account on X has posted requests to recruit a “very small number” of full-time salaried positions for engineers and back-office functions like human resources.

The DOGE team, including those paid engineers, is largely working out of a glass building in SpaceX’s downtown office located a few blocks from the White House. Some people close to Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk hope that these DOGE engineers can use artificial intelligence to find cost-cutting opportunities.

The broader effort is being run by two people with starkly different backgrounds: One is Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and former top health official in Mr. Trump’s first White House who is close with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. Mr. Smith has effectively been running DOGE during the transition period, with a particular focus on recruiting, especially for the workers who will be embedded at the agencies.

Mr. Smith has been working closely with Steve Davis, a collaborator of Mr. Musk’s for two decades who is widely seen as working as Mr. Musk’s proxy on all things. Mr. Davis has joined Mr. Musk as he calls experts with questions about the federal budget, for instance.

Other people involved include Matt Luby, Mr. Ramaswamy’s chief of staff and childhood friend; Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign official; and Rachel Riley, a McKinsey partner who works closely with Mr. Smith.

Mr. Musk’s personal counsel — Chris Gober — and Mr. Ramaswamy’s personal lawyer — Steve Roberts — have been exploring various legal issues regarding the structure of DOGE. James Burnham, a former Justice Department official, is also helping DOGE with legal matters. Bill McGinley, Mr. Trump’s initial pick for White House counsel who was instead named as legal counsel for DOGE, has played a more minimal role.

“DOGE will be a cornerstone of the new administration, helping President Trump deliver his vision of a new golden era,” said James Fishback, the founder of Azoria, an investment firm, and confidant of Mr. Ramaswamy who will be providing outside advice for DOGE.

Despite all this firepower, many budget experts have been deeply skeptical about the effort and its cost-cutting ambitions. Mr. Musk initially said the effort could result in “at least $2 trillion” in cuts from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. But budget experts say that goal would be difficult to achieve without slashing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Mr. Trump has promised not to cut.

Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have also recast what success might mean. Mr. Ramaswamy emphasized DOGE-led deregulation on X last month, saying that removing regulations could stimulate the economy and that “the success of DOGE can’t be measured through deficit reduction alone.”

And in an interview last week with Mark Penn, the chairman and chief executive of Stagwell, a marketing company, Mr. Musk downplayed the total potential savings.

“We’ll try for $2 trillion — I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Mr. Musk said. “You kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for two trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”