The chainsaw ethos of President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting department is giving way to a more methodical, and modest, operation as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the group’s de facto head, steps back from the national spotlight.
Musk, tapped to lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, barreled into Washington in January with few constraints and a mandate to slash $2 trillion in spending. His staffers, a hodgepodge of young programmers and long-time confidants, embarked on a quest to cull tens of thousands of federal jobs and shutter entire agencies.
But the department soon morphed into a lightning rod of controversy. Employees were fired in blanket cuts that swept up nuclear weapons and disease outbreak personnel, prompting agencies to scramble to rehire them.
DOGE engaged in dramatic standoffs at shuttered agency buildings, repeatedly evicting leadership with the help of law enforcement.
Four months into DOGE’s creation, and with Musk refocusing his attention to his business empire, his blitz has transitioned into something more orderly.
Cabinet secretaries have begun a slower consolidation of their departments without the tumult of Musk’s firing spree. DOGE continues to cancel federal contracts, claiming $170 billion in savings to date, but is now doing so in coordination with agency heads.
Gone are Musk’s “five things you did this week” email threats that spawned the first signs of resistance from Trump’s new Cabinet.
Musk, an informal adviser to Trump and his largest 2024 donor, still plans to stay involved in DOGE and will keep his West Wing office. But his time at the fore of the department is already coming to an end, prompting existential questions about the agency.
DOGE lacks another leader with the same weight and force of personality — its acting administrator, Amy Gleason, is considered a figurehead — while the durability of his rollback will be decided in the coming months by the two other branches of government.
The Supreme Court could overturn, or side with, the federal judges who have frozen much of DOGE’s work. Congress will also vote on whether to codify Musk’s efforts through a series of White House rescissions requests.
In his absence, Republicans who support Musk’s vision of rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” have become preoccupied with other pursuits, chiefly passing Trump’s tax cut-and-border agenda.
“Is that still going on?” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said of DOGE with a smirk.
He and other members of the Senate DOGE Caucus have stopped meeting, according to several senators, after a flurry of interest in January, while Musk himself made an informal exit two weeks ago, when he gave a series of interviews with national press.
“It just doesn’t have the same punch as it did at the beginning,” Cramer said. “It was so big coming out of the blocks that it’s sort of like throwing a grenade in the middle of the room, and then, you know, picking all the pieces up afterwards.”
Musk still plans to devote a day or two a week to DOGE, allowing him to stretch his 130 days as a special government employee well past May, but has dedicated an increasing share of his time to his companies.
Musk’s pivot came after Tesla’s revenue dropped 9% in the first quarter, a three-year low fueled in part by his foray into politics.
DOGE’s disciples
Musk waxed philosophical about his pending departure from DOGE in an April interview with a small group of reporters, likening himself to a religious leader whose movement would survive him.
“DOGE is a way of life. Like Buddhism,” Musk told the New York Times.
“Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?” he said. “Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
Musk has struggled to live up to the grandeur of that statement. His declaration that DOGE would slash “at least” $2 trillion from the federal budget shrank to $1 trillion by the time Trump took office.
To date, the $170 billion in savings on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” are plagued by reported inaccuracies or inflated estimates.
Yet DOGE is indisputably the brainchild of Musk and will continue to be staffed by employees plucked from his companies and Silicon Valley.
DOGE was first envisioned as a blue-ribbon-style commission that would offer recommendations to the president, with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as its co-leader. But it quickly became a full-fledged agency guided by Musk’s management style, undertaking the same deep layoffs he pursued upon taking over and rebranding Twitter.
Ramaswamy left to run for governor of Ohio on Inauguration Day, though some reports suggest Musk forced him out.
In total, Musk estimates that around 100 employees work for DOGE, with senior members leading outposts at various federal agencies. Most come from the tech sector and skew younger and male.
Staffers have focused on canceling diversity grants Musk deemed to be “woke” alongside longer-term, less controversial projects, such as modernizing the government’s paper retirement system and closing unused credit card accounts.
Agencies have been instructed to coordinate with DOGE on downsizing plans, while its staffers have also begun helping immigration authorities use government datasets to track illegal migrants.
Steve Davis, who has worked for Musk since 2003, when he was one of the first employees hired at SpaceX, is considered his top lieutenant. Brad Smith, a healthcare entrepreneur, and Chris Young, a GOP political consultant, round out his leadership team.
Outside of DOGE, Musk has a natural ally in Russ Vought, the White House budget director who this month released a “skinny” budget proposing $163 billion in cuts to the federal government.
Vought has a higher profile in the Trump administration, owing to his role in Project 2025 and original stint as budget director in Trump’s first term. But he has dismissed the notion that Musk will be passing the DOGE torch to him as a media fiction.
“Look, a lot of editorial writers and news reports I think have been over their skis with regard to me being named for DOGE,” Vought told Fox News on Wednesday, calling the department a partner to his work at the Office of Management and Budget.
Gleason, the acting administrator, manages a small subset of holdover technologists from the U.S. Digital Service, a White House department that Trump used as a shell for DOGE, according to ProPublica.
Cabinet takeover
Musk’s influence, nearly unchecked in the early days of Trump’s second term, had begun to wane weeks before his decision to step back. The Senate confirmed most of his Cabinet secretaries by February, depriving Musk of the leadership vacuum that had given him control in the first place.
When Musk started to demand all federal employees list five tasks they performed each week, threatening to terminate anyone who did not reply to his email, select agencies told their staff to ignore him.
Trump, facing blowback from his agency heads, then placed limits on Musk’s firing spree in early March, telling them it was their decision who gets cut.
Trump later placated an incensed Scott Bessent, the head of the Treasury Department, after Musk installed his choice for IRS administrator. That administrator was soon removed and replaced with Bessent’s deputy.
The shift in power suggests a diminished role for DOGE in reorganizing the government, though it continues to push boundaries. This past week, DOGE unsuccessfully tried to embed in the Government Accountability Office and a second office on workplace rights, both of which fall under the purview of Congress.
Yet departments have also found a synergy with Musk’s staffers, integrating them into agency-wide overhauls that meet Trump’s cost-cutting mandate.
In April, Rubio announced plans to eliminate 132 offices and 700 positions at the State Department. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a 20% reduction in the number of four-star generals and admirals.
DOGE has also inspired offshoots at the state level, with Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis establishing task forces to review government spending.
DOGE in limbo
It will ultimately be up to the courts to decide whether Musk’s more sweeping cuts survive. The Supreme Court handed Musk a win in April, allowing his firing of probationary workers, a class of employees who lack full job protections, at six Cabinet agencies to move forward.
But there is still a second freeze on a broader class of employees. On Friday, the Trump administration asked the high court to lift that order, issued this month by a federal judge in California.
The Supreme Court is also weighing whether federal judges can impose nationwide injunctions, a type of ruling that has stymied DOGE’s ability to carry out its layoffs, access government systems, and cancel federal contracts.
Conservative justices, who hold a 6-3 majority on the court, appear inclined to rule in the Trump administration’s favor, though litigants would still have other avenues to challenge DOGE’s actions.
In Congress, DOGE could face resistance from a crop of centrist Republicans uncomfortable with the sweeping nature of DOGE’s rollback. The White House has conceded its cuts will need to be approved by lawmakers and initially planned to send its first rescissions request, aimed at canceling billions in foreign aid, in late April.
But the request has yet to be sent to Republican leadership, signaling it could face trouble in the House or Senate.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said Thursday that the White House had not indicated when it would send over its $9.3 billion package, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the top GOP appropriator in the Senate, predicted it would be delayed until after Trump’s agenda is passed through Congress, likely in July or August.
Collins, one of two Senate Republicans to torpedo Trump’s last rescission in 2018, has registered concerns about a clawback in AIDS funding.
“I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s being held up until after the budget resolution,” she told the Washington Examiner.
In the meantime, Republicans deny their partnership with DOGE is over. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the few Democrats to join the House DOGE Caucus, last week declared the group “dead,” and in a brief interview claimed Musk never involved lawmakers in its efforts.
“Look, the caucus is a complete failure. We had two meetings in five months,” he said. “We weren’t included in any of the conversations. It was all done in the executive branch.”
Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL), the co-chairman of the caucus, disputed that account, calling the trillion-plus in spending cuts wrapped into Trump’s “big beautiful bill” evidence of collaboration. He cited further consultations with Vought, Musk, and Vice President JD Vance on the rescissions.
“Rest assured, we are here for the long haul, and our work is far from finished,” Bean said.
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In his exit interview, Musk suggested that DOGE, scheduled to disband on July 4, 2026, could still achieve its more ambitious goals and might even stay active for the remainder of Trump’s term. But he simultaneously conceded its success is partially out of his control, blaming the “inertia” of Washington for the modest savings thus far.
“It’s sort of, how much pain is the Cabinet and this Congress willing to take? It can be done, but it requires dealing with a lot of complaints,” Musk said at the White House.