Elon Musk wants to nuke federal regulations now and ask questions later.

Mr. Musk, the head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, said the nation should undergo a “wholesale removal of regulations.”

“Like regulations basically should be default gone. Default gone, not default there, default gone, and if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we [can] always add it back in,” Mr. Musk said on a live session on X. “These regulations are added willy nilly all the time.”

Mr. Musk said a “whole spring cleaning of regulations” was necessary to get the government “off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.”

“If the government has millions of regulations holding everybody back - it is not freedom,” he said. “We have to restore freedom.”

Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month that ordered the federal government to scrap 10 regulations for every new one established.

“The ever-expanding morass of complicated Federal regulation imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness,” the executive order said.

However, Mr. Musk suggested during the X session this week with Sens. Joni Erst of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah that federal bureaucrats will find ways to “game” the executive order and the government would be better off starting from scratch.

“These regulations, if you look at them, there are millions of them, and it is not like any one regulation is the show stopper,” Mr. Musk said. “The way I sort of visualize it is America is like Gulliver, tied down by millions of little strings, and we need to cut those strings and free the giant.”

• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.