Former President Donald Trump is set to unveil a series of new economic plans in a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, including the creation of a presidential commission focused on making government more efficient, a proposal first made by Elon Musk, a source familiar with the speech told CNN.
According to sources, Trump is expected to announce that the committee will be tasked with conducting a “full financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” to uncover and root out any wrongdoing.
President Trump is also expected to outline new proposals to tackle government regulation, including those targeting energy production, and vow to draw down unused funds allocated during the Biden administration. The speech is also likely to touch on his recent support for cryptocurrencies and reaffirm his plans to impose blanket tariffs on imports.
Trump’s planned announcement was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
President Trump and Republicans want to repeal funding increases included in recent bills pushed through Congress by Democrats, including the Inflation Control Act of 2022, which would pump about $80 billion into the Internal Revenue Service over 10 years and introduce a variety of climate change measures. Republican lawmakers have already succeeded in cutting $20 billion from the IRS’s funding.
And while President Trump and Republican lawmakers have long touted rooting out waste, fraud and abuse as a way to save the federal government money, those arguments “are often just an excuse for inaction,” said Mark Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
He said for Trump’s committee to be most effective, it needs to be given a broad mandate to review the federal government’s biggest spending programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and defense.
The Trump campaign, which has made the economy a top priority ahead of the November election, designed Thursday’s speech as an attempt to contrast the former president’s economic plan with that of Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump campaign advisers said.
The economy, a notable weakness for President Joe Biden, continues to be the most frequently chosen topic by voters when asked what is important in the presidential election. A recent CNN poll found that an average of 39% of voters in six battleground states chose the economy as their top issue.