The Department of Government Efficiency no longer exists as a distinct bureaucratic entity, but its spirit will live on in every federal agency as long as President Donald Trump is in office. That is not a direct quote from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, but it captures the essence of what amounted to his eulogy for DOGE.
When businessman Elon Musk first proposed setting up DOGE, he promised $2 trillion in savings for taxpayers, saying that “there is a lot of waste and fraud” in the federal government and “we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.”
On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order titled “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency,” which renamed the existing U.S. Digital Service, expanded its mission, and directed each federal agency to designate four employees as “DOGE Team” members. Separately, Musk was named a senior adviser to the president and charged by Trump with leading DOGE, although he was never an administrator or employee of the agency.
With Musk at the helm, DOGE began a firing spree, canning over 200,000 federal employees and accepting buyouts from another 75,000. Billions of dollars in contracts were canceled across the federal government, including a $1 million contract for a “diversity communications campaign” at the Department of Agriculture and a $4 million contract for diversity, equity, and inclusion training for the Department of Labor’s Jobs Corps program.
But the number of obviously wasteful contracts Musk’s DOGE team found was more limited than its members expected. The DOGE website claims just $214 billion in savings, far short of the $2 trillion Musk promised. Even then, many of the contracts canceled were for services that agencies would need to purchase again, such as information technology support.
Many of Musk’s firings also turned out to be temporary. After DOGE fired more than 300 employees at the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, many were rehired within weeks. Instead of a careful analysis of each employee and their productivity, DOGE randomly fired thousands of people without considering how agencies would continue functioning. Musk promised a scalpel but delivered a chain saw.
To be fair, his tenure at DOGE was never sold as permanent. Musk was clear from the start that he only planned to serve in the administration for a few months, and his “special government employee” status, which allowed him to be in the federal government without having to file substantial financial disclosures, had a maximum 130-day term. That said, he left much more unpopular than he was when he took the DOGE job, and while he is still influential in the Trump White House, he is far less powerful a figure than he was before.
The White House has disputed DOGE’s demise. After Kupor told Reuters this month that DOGE “doesn’t exist” and is not a “centralized entity,” Kupor followed up with a statement on X, explaining, “The truth is DOGE may not have centralized leadership under [United States Digital Service]. 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.” In other words, DOGE’s spirit lives on.
It is a worthy spirit to keep alive. In Trump’s first term, he instituted a “one-in-two-out” rule, which required federal agencies to rescind two federal regulations for every new one implemented. That worked then, and a similar policy can work now.
But there was an arrogant and indiscriminate glee with which Musk and his DOGE team fired workers and canceled contracts within the first few months of Trump’s second term. It was not the careful and competent government efficiency project voters were promised.
THE DEMOCRATS’ RECKLESS CALL FOR MILITARY DISOBEDIENCE
Trump’s tariff agenda has been implemented with a similar unthinking bravado. The specific tariff rates and countries identified by Trump on “Liberation Day” made no economic or common sense. Allies were punished along with enemies without any coherent long-term strategy. The United States economy and its standing in the world have suffered as a result.
Trump was wise to let DOGE fizzle out as Musk left town. He would be equally wise to orchestrate a similar quiet ending to his failed tariff regime.