​Elon Musk’s takeover of DOGE​

Throughout his first 100 days in office, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been Donald Trump’s battering ram, cutting the federal government and attempting to sway its remaining elements to his wishes.

Motivated by a group of twentysomething programmers and computer specialists who have taken over government agencies, DOGE has disregarded conventions and, in certain situations, federal regulations in order to slash spending, revoke federal contracts and building leases, and dissolve entire departments.

Some of the most sensitive systems in the government, which handle billions of dollars in federal payments and hold personal information for hundreds of millions of Americans, federal employees, and foreign nationals, have been breached by DOGE. Over 100,000 government workers have been let go in the process, including highly qualified scientists and professionals in a variety of disciplines including public health, international assistance and diplomacy, and disaster relief.

The richest guy in the world, Musk, has represented DOGE and promoted its conclusions, which are frequently rife with errors or misrepresentations. He often appeared with Trump in joint interviews and was featured behind Trump’s Oval Office desk on a February Time Magazine cover, giving the impression that he was the second most powerful person in the country during his first 100 days in office.

However, Musk said on a Tesla earnings call this week that his work at DOGE is “mostly done” despite political blowback, conflicts with Trump’s Cabinet, and issues at his electric vehicle firm. Although Musk is permitted to work for 130 days as a “special government employee,” he stated that he will start to take a break beginning next month, but he will still work at DOGE one or two days a week.

The fact that many of Musk’s lieutenants now hold senior posts in other federal departments may enable the DOGE budget cuts outlast Musk’s time in office, even if he passes away.

Whatever happens next, DOGE’s first 100 days have been historically significant and will have an ongoing effect for years to come.

Donald Kettl, a former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and the author of several books on the federal government, stated that “DOGE is unlike anything else in American history.”

If Musk departs within the next hour, Kettl continued, “the legacy will be something that will last for a very long time.” “Because it took decades and decades to put together the federal government in its current form.” And in several locations, he has brought it to its core in less than a hundred days.

A political backlash beyond Washington

Although it’s too soon to gauge DOGE’s full political impact, there are indications of a reaction, including early Democratic election victories and ire at town halls.

Since the GOP’s victories in November put Democrats out of control of all houses of the federal government, they have made Musk and DOGE a key component of their early strategy to regain control of the House and Senate the next year.

Last month, a state Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin, a longtime battleground, provided a sneak peek at the potential effectiveness of such approach. The tech tycoon contributed almost $20 million to the election through personal donations and expenditures made by organizations he has previously supported. However, the liberal candidate defeated the conservative, who was backed by Musk, paving the way for what may be 19 months of Musk-focused advertising.

Town halls across the nation have been crowded with opponents of the DOGE cuts, including those hosted by Democrats, who are under pressure to do more to oppose Trump’s administration, and the few public gatherings hosted by Republicans, who have been questioned sharply about whether the spending cuts will jeopardize essential services.

The sights are reminiscent of 2009, when the conservative resistance to then-President Barack Obama’s efforts to reform America’s health insurance system became known as the “tea party,” and the GOP was swept into power on Capitol Hill in the 2010 midterm elections.

They also recall Trump’s first term, when his attempt to repeal Obamacare was greeted with strong opposition at Republican lawmakers’ town halls nationwide. This was a precursor to the wave that would propel Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterm elections.

Republican legislators have so far mostly backed Musk and Trump. Rep. Mike Flood said to a boisterous gathering in Nebraska in March that “there are a lot of people in this room that don’t support what DOGE is doing.”

Before being overpowered by jeers, he said, “But for the first time we are making some progress identifying places that we can reduce the budget.”

DOGE’s shrinking savings goal

At first, Musk promised that he could slash $2 trillion from the country’s approximately $6.8 trillion federal budget—more than the federal government spends on education, veterans’ health, and military put together. At a Cabinet meeting earlier this month, he allegedly appeared to reduce the amount to $150 billion for the upcoming fiscal year, reversing his earlier January objective that $1 trillion would be “an epic outcome.”

It is possible that DOGE may cause expensive turmoil without improving efficiency because the early rewards don’t even approach adding up to significant savings.

As of April 20, DOGE reported that it has saved $160 billion through a mix of asset sales, lease and contract cancellations or renegotiated agreements, grant termination, the removal of illegal and fraudulent payments, personnel reductions, and regulatory and program changes.

However, according to Nat Malkus, a senior scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, DOGE’s calculations are incorrect.

He said that they were overvaluing the contracts and the savings, surpassing what a reasonable person would consider to be actual savings.

According to Malkus, DOGE usually reports the savings as the difference between the contract’s highest possible price and the amount the agency has already committed to pay. But he contended that the savings need to be the difference between the agreed upon amount and the actual amount paid thus far.

Malkus calculated that DOGE’s claimed contract savings of approximately $19 billion in late March really came to less than $10 billion.

Furthermore, according to Rachel Snyderman, managing director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, the agency doesn’t really gain anything by terminating contracts. Unused funds are simply returned to the agency, which may request that Congress reallocate them to other agency requirements. The White House may also request that Congress withdraw the funding.

Republicans in Congress and the administration are now debating a recission plan. Additionally, they are drafting tax-cutting legislation that, if approved, could add trillions more to the $36 trillion federal debt that Trump has pledged to pay down, in part using DOGE savings.

Musk has claimed—without proof—that federal systems like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are rife with fraud, waste, and abuse totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. His allegations are questioned by budget specialists.

“We cannot escape our current financial crisis by merely eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in those programs and throughout the government,” Snyderman stated.

Reforming obligatory expenditure programs like Social Security and Medicare would be necessary to make a significant impact on the nation’s deficit.

Snyderman asserted that the $36 trillion national debt was not caused by the Department of Education.

The outcome of more than 100 lawsuits contesting DOGE-related actions—which range from the dissolution of multiple agencies to whether DOGE has access to data from the IRS, the Treasury Department, and the Social Security Administration, among others—may determine the final effect of DOGE’s imprint on the federal government.

Feeding government ‘into the wood chipper’

Trump seemed to reward two of his most ardent supporters with the equivalent of a blue-ribbon panel on reducing government spending when he announced a week after his election in November that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head the newly established Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk and his group have more ambitious goals.

While the team Musk put together spread out among the Trump transition agency teams to get started right away on January 20, Musk found a home in a little-known federal office—the US Digital Service, which was established during the Obama administration.

The US Agency for International Development was DOGE’s first major target.

DOGE staff entered USAID headquarters less than two weeks into Trump’s administration in order to examine the organization’s personnel files and data security systems. Musk’s lieutenants attempted to stop receiving funding from USAID.

After being appointed interim administrator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended up terminating 83% of USAID contracts. Employees of USAID worldwide were instructed to return to the United States and placed on leave.

Contract cancellations quickly caused a void across the world, and the administration even discontinued projects that the State Department had waived because they were performing life-saving work.

Musk claimed to have “fed USAID into the wood chipper” during the weekend.

The DOGE team was granted access to the Consumer Financial Protection organization’s servers and the CFPB Twitter account was deactivated. The organization was established to combat financial companies’ abusive behavior and has long been attacked by Republicans.

Russell Vought, a co-author of “Project 2025,” who was placed in charge of the Trump budget, ordered the CFPB to halt almost all of its activities. Although the layoffs are presently on hold while the matter is being challenged in court, the Trump administration intends to eliminate 90% of the CFPB personnel, or around 1,500 of the 1,700 people that make up the bureau.

The Social Security Administration is in chaos as a result of DOGE’s tendency to move quickly and damage things. The agency, which provides monthly payments to over 73 million retirees, those with disabilities, and others, is undergoing a significant reorganization, which DOGE and the White House are spearheading, according to interim commissioner Leland Dudek. Some of the reforms, Dudek told Social Security supporters, would normally take two years to implement, but the Trump administration was working to get them into effect within weeks.

Because of the pandemonium it caused for beneficiaries, who flocked to Social Security’s field offices and phone lines fearing that their payments would be stopped, the government was obliged to reverse a major policy change that was planned in the name of fighting fraud.

A scheme to provide immigration officials access to sensitive taxpayer data in order to expedite the deportation of suspected illegal immigrants has been spearheaded by DOGE employees at the IRS.

Career authorities consistently declined, telling the DOGE team that it would be against the law to do so. However, their objections were dismissed, and as a result of the dispute, two acting IRS commissioners and around six other senior officials left the agency.

‘The cruelty is the point’

Musk offered a payout if the 2.4 million government employees decided to quit their jobs in an email titled “Fork in the Road,” which was one of his first moves after Trump took office. (For reasons such as national security, certain posts were excluded.) The email’s subject line was a parody of one Musk wrote to Twitter staff during his antagonistic reorganization of the social media behemoth.

Musk has pushed for agencies to cut personnel in a number of ways, including the “Fork in the Road” email.

Probationary employees have been singled out by the Trump administration, which has fired hundreds of workers who were new to their present position but not necessarily new to working for the federal government. Trump’s order to terminate DEI programs included the termination of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) program employees at federal agencies.

According to a government employee who was fired in February, “if I am being honest, I feel like the cruelty is the point.”

The majority of federal agencies have individually provided incentives to staff members who choose to prolong their departure, seek early retirement, or split voluntarily.

Each federal department filed a “reduction in force” plan, in part to address the larger reductions DOGE is requesting. Trump also wants to abolish the Department of Education, which said in March that it was laying off over half of its staff. Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services stated that it will lay off 20,000 of its 82,000 full-time employees.

Federal employees claim that the DOGE officials now working in agencies have instilled a culture of terror among the remaining staff.

In February, DOGE once more asked all federal employees, via the Office of Personnel Management, “What did you do last week?” via its bulk email system.

Musk’s menacing postscript on X, which read, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” went much farther than the unsigned email that was issued under his command.

Trump’s Cabinet was alarmed by the unexpected email message, and a number of department heads advised staff not to reply. It was among the first instances in which the DOGE chairman was contradicted by Trump’s Cabinet.

For some, it is still insufficient despite the significant DOGE-led cuts that agencies are implementing. Deferred resignation offers, which permit workers to leave their jobs but continue to receive compensation until September 30, have been reopened by at least seven agencies in recent weeks.

Some organizations issued warnings about the new offerings.

The US Department of Agriculture email, which CNN has seen, stated, “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding which positions will remain – or where they will be located – after USDA’s restructuring.”

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