Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are leaning on the conservative Supreme Court to support their ambitious plans to slash federal regulations and increase government efficiency.

Tapped by President-elect Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy will head the newly minted "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE, a nongovernmental commission to dismantle government bureaucracy and cut costs.

“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government,” they wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail.”

The op-ed leans on the idea that a Supreme Court recrafted by Trump, who appointed three conservative justices during his first term, will reject legal challenges from the left that might rise against initiatives led by Musk and Ramaswamy.

But legal and financial experts suggested that the court has not given the duo much additional leeway for the sweeping changes they seek to enact.

“They want to go in with a blow torch, and really it's going to take a pair of tweezers to really unravel what the bureaucratic infrastructure is in Washington,” said Joann Needleman, who leads the financial services regulatory and compliance practice at law firm Clark Hill.

Musk and Ramaswamy cited Supreme Court rulings in two recent cases that sharply curbed the power of executive agencies as a “mandate” from the justices to cut back regulations.

In 2022, the high........

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