The Department of Government Efficiency was created to fulfill the long-time conservative dream of cleaning out a federal government that is supposedly riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, but the project has apparently come to a premature end after running into a more mundane reality.
Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month that DOGE, as it was known, has ceased to function, eight months before its scheduled shutdown next summer. “That doesn't exist,” Kupor said, adding that DOGE is no longer a “centralized entity” and that many of DOGE’s functions have been absorbed by OPM.
Kupor also said that a government-wide hiring freeze, a signature DOGE initiative, is now over.
On Monday, the White House pushed back against the Reuters story, saying that while DOGE is now decentralized, its spirit lives on. “The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS [U.S. DOGE Service],” Kupor wrote. “But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”
Still, even as he sang its praises, Kupor referred to DOGE in the past tense. “DOGE catalyzed these changes,” he wrote, adding that “the agencies ... will institutionalize them!”
What was it? DOGE, whose name invokes a popular “meme coin” cryptocurrency, was the brainchild of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who promised to bring technical wizardry and good-old-fashioned common sense to budgeting and staffing in the federal government, with the promise of saving literally trillions of dollars in government spending. Musk vowed he could cut some $2 trillion in waste, though that lofty estimate was halved by the time the project started moving from campaign trail rhetoric to an actual agency within the executive branch.
As the second Trump administration got rolling earlier this year, Musk and his hand-selected group of youthful data engineers — including a 19-year-old named Edward Coristine, who famously went by the nickname “Big Balls” — pressured government workers to quit as part of a plan to root out what they said was wasteful spending. But much of the waste, it turns out, was simply spending they disagreed with for political reasons, including foreign aid and rent for office space. Nevertheless, thousands of employees were fired or furloughed, contracts were canceled and an entire federal agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, was fed “into the wood chipper,” as Musk memorably put it.
The savings, though, proved harder to come by than initially estimated, and Musk left the project in May amid conflict with President Trump. DOGE staffers, many of whom had been living in the offices they were aiming to close, reportedly packed up their sleeping bags in June.
One problem DOGE encountered is that the federal government was nowhere near as swampy as they imagined. One former staffer who was embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs told NPR in June that he was “pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.”
“I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse,” the staffer, Sahil Lavingia, said. While there may be some waste, there is very little fraud and virtually no abuse. “I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing,” he said.
Lavingia added that the government could take steps to become more efficient, such as cutting down on paper use and faxing. “[B]ut these aren't necessarily fraud, waste and abuse,” he said. “These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.”
Producing savings, or more waste? DOGE claimed huge savings on a website that tracked its activities, but analysts raised questions about the accuracy of its claims. “[W]hen Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all,” The New York Times’s David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine said in April.
Some of DOGE’s critics said the project was doomed from the start, given its fanciful assumptions about rampant waste, fraud and abuse. Worse, some suspected that DOGE was created to give Musk and his minions an excuse to run wild in the federal government’s information systems — a suspicion backed by whistleblower claims that sensitive Social Security data on hundreds of millions of Americans was downloaded by DOGE operatives, putting the information at risk.
Others called DOGE a success, if you assume its real purpose was to impair the government and terrorize federal employees — an odd idea, perhaps, but one that meshed with a comment by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who famously said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” by a second Trump administration.
In any event, it’s clear that DOGE fell far short, at least when it comes to its main claim of saving massive amounts of money. “Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was,” Bobby Kogan, a budget analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank who served as an adviser in the Biden administration, wrote on social media. “Spending in FY25 was not only [higher] than in FY24 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump took office.”
Jessica Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, wrote that DOGE failed because it did not understand that waste plays only a minor role in federal budget deficits. Staffing by “arrogant, unqualified hacks” made it worse, while attempting to circumvent Congress on spending matters probably made it illegal.
“It was always just ‘spending cut theater,’” Riedl concluded.DOGE Reportedly Shut Down Months Ahead of Schedule
The Department of Government Efficiency was created to fulfill the long-time conservative dream of cleaning out a federal government that is supposedly riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, but the project has apparently come to a premature end after running into a more mundane reality.
Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month that DOGE, as it was known, has ceased to function, eight months before its scheduled shutdown next summer. “That doesn't exist,” Kupor said, adding that DOGE is no longer a “centralized entity” and that many of DOGE’s functions have been absorbed by OPM.
Kupor also said that a government-wide hiring freeze, a signature DOGE initiative, is now over.
On Monday, the White House pushed back against the Reuters story, saying that while DOGE is now decentralized, its spirit lives on. “The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS [U.S. DOGE Service],” Kupor wrote. “But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”
Still, even as he sang its praises, Kupor referred to DOGE in the past tense. “DOGE catalyzed these changes,” he wrote, adding that “the agencies ... will institutionalize them!”
What was it? DOGE, whose name invokes a popular “meme coin” cryptocurrency, was the brainchild of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who promised to bring technical wizardry and good-old-fashioned common sense to budgeting and staffing in the federal government, with the promise of saving literally trillions of dollars in government spending. Musk vowed he could cut some $2 trillion in waste, though that lofty estimate was halved by the time the project started moving from campaign trail rhetoric to an actual agency within the executive branch.
As the second Trump administration got rolling earlier this year, Musk and his hand-selected group of youthful data engineers — including a 19-year-old named Edward Coristine, who famously went by the nickname “Big Balls” — pressured government workers to quit as part of a plan to root out what they said was wasteful spending. But much of the waste, it turns out, was simply spending they disagreed with for political reasons, including foreign aid and rent for office space. Nevertheless, thousands of employees were fired or furloughed, contracts were canceled and an entire federal agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, was fed “into the wood chipper,” as Musk memorably put it.
The savings, though, proved harder to come by than initially estimated, and Musk left the project in May amid conflict with President Trump. DOGE staffers, many of whom had been living in the offices they were aiming to close, reportedly packed up their sleeping bags in June.
One problem DOGE encountered is that the federal government was nowhere near as swampy as they imagined. One former staffer who was embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs told NPR in June that he was “pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.”
“I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse,” the staffer, Sahil Lavingia, said. While there may be some waste, there is very little fraud and virtually no abuse. “I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing,” he said.
Lavingia added that the government could take steps to become more efficient, such as cutting down on paper use and faxing. “[B]ut these aren't necessarily fraud, waste and abuse,” he said. “These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.”
Producing savings, or more waste? DOGE claimed huge savings on a website that tracked its activities, but analysts raised questions about the accuracy of its claims. “[W]hen Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all,” The New York Times’s David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine said in April.
Some of DOGE’s critics said the project was doomed from the start, given its fanciful assumptions about rampant waste, fraud and abuse. Worse, some suspected that DOGE was created to give Musk and his minions an excuse to run wild in the federal government’s information systems — a suspicion backed by whistleblower claims that sensitive Social Security data on hundreds of millions of Americans was downloaded by DOGE operatives, putting the information at risk.
Others called DOGE a success, if you assume its real purpose was to impair the government and terrorize federal employees — an odd idea, perhaps, but one that meshed with a comment by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who famously said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” by a second Trump administration.
In any event, it’s clear that DOGE fell far short, at least when it comes to its main claim of saving massive amounts of money. “Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was,” Bobby Kogan, a budget analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank who served as an adviser in the Biden administration, wrote on social media. “Spending in FY25 was not only [higher] than in FY24 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump took office.”
Jessica Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, wrote that DOGE failed because it did not understand that waste plays only a minor role in federal budget deficits. Staffing by “arrogant, unqualified hacks” made it worse, while attempting to circumvent Congress on spending matters probably made it illegal.
“It was always just ‘spending cut theater,’” Riedl concluded.