Before Donald Trump re-entered the White House last month, his top donor Elon Musk’s grand plan to slash trillions of dollars in US government spending appeared to consist of little more than a logo of a dog wearing sunglasses, and a stream of provocative social media posts.
But behind the scenes, the richest man on the globe had quietly recruited tech executives and a slew of young coders, who would quickly deliver shock treatment to one of the world’s largest bureaucracies.
Emissaries from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have infiltrated major agencies, fired or suspended tens of thousands of civil servants, and gained access to reams of sensitive security, health and financial data.
Despite being a reconfigured branch of the White House, Doge officials have installed themselves inside the federal government: at the US Treasury, the state and health departments, the Federal Aviation Administration, and a host of smaller bodies — with some even sleeping over at federal buildings. An entire $40bn agency, USAID, has in effect been closed, with contracts cancelled and its workforce set to be slashed from 10,000 to about 600 staff.
In an assault that has shocked senior lawmakers, Doge staffers have begun auditing trillions of dollars’ worth of remittances, had access to social security numbers, bank account details and even health records of US citizens.
“No information has been provided to Congress or the public as to who has been formally hired under Doge [or] under what authority or regulations Doge is operating,” eight Democratic senators protested to the White House this week.
In Washington DC this week, Democratic members of Congress joined protests against Musk outside the Treasury Department. Some carried signs saying “stop the coup” and “nobody elected Musk”.
Doge’s rapid progress astonished even its early supporters. “Doge is doing things that we could have never fathomed,” says James Fishback, an investor who advised the body after its formation in November. “They are acting with speed, and they are acting with urgency.”
But the devastating real-world consequences of taking a sledgehammer to several key agencies have quickly become apparent, with HIV medication left undelivered in South Africa and elsewhere, life saving clinical trials paused, and critical government websites flickering on and off.
“We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” says Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman. “Attacks on the civil service — from air traffic controllers to food and drug inspectors — aim to destroy congressional power, which is the people’s power.”
Musk has morphed into the most prominent of the so-called techno-libertarians in Silicon Valley, who believe government regulations hinder innovation and profits.
Although his companies benefit from more than $20bn in government contracts, he has long complained about red tape stifling Tesla, SpaceX and others.
Soon after he began donating a quarter of a billion dollars to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, Musk angled for a role in downsizing the state, publicly setting an improbable target of saving $2tn, or almost a third of the US’s $6.8tn annual budget.
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Even Republican leaders who have long relished the opportunity to shrink government seemed to doubt Musk’s mission. When asked in December whether Doge would succeed, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell told the FT, “Who knows?”
Musk himself downplayed expectations in early January, suggesting Doge might only be able to identify $1tn worth of cuts. His co-leader at the proposed department, Vivek Ramaswamy, soon departed the initiative, along with its chief legal counsel.
“My initial read was: well, they can’t do much of anything,” says a former Republican congressional staffer. “I feel like it was this colossal headfake.”
Any doubts about Doge’s efficacy were set aside by the opening salvos in Musk’s cost-cutting drive, as his team rapidly became the government’s de facto human resources department, offering buyouts to millions of employees, and getting rid of diversity, aid and development programmes.
This ambush on the civil service, which has prompted outrage from labour unions and civil rights organisations, has been met with jubilation from Musk’s friends in Silicon Valley and other tech entrepreneurs. “The US government has become a destructive force in American society,” says Keith Rabois, a Trump donor and tech investor who has known Musk for over two decades.
Doge’s tactics seem to have been adopted from the start-up ecosystem. Many of its moves have closely mirrored those deployed by Musk after taking over Twitter in 2022, when he and his deputies quickly slashed costs, fired 80 per cent of the workforce and demanded fealty from those who remained in what critics dubbed the “destruction playbook”.
An email sent last week urging federal workers to accept a redundancy offer used the same phrase — “A fork in the road” — that Musk had used during his Twitter restructuring.
Musk has also enlisted the help of some of his inner circle who helped with his Twitter takeover, known as the “goons” — as well as a raft of young engineers in their late teens and early twenties who reportedly responded to his callout for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” willing to work more than 80 hours a week on the initiative.
Among the more experienced loyalists, Musk has brought in Steve Davis, the head of his tunnelling start-up The Boring Company, who led cut-throat rounds of lay-offs at X and hard bargaining with vendors from a “war room” in the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Musk succeeded in shrinking the company, but the process was turbulent. Former staff argue the company lost critical talent and knowledge of how X’s systems worked as a result of his heavy-handed manoeuvring, leading to multiple glitches in the months after the takeover. In some cases, the company begged fired employees to return. Others noted that a familiar refrain from Musk at the time would be to “let them sue” — an approach that eventually invited legal challenges and stand-offs with contractors.
Nonetheless, Musk has embraced comparisons with his makeover of Twitter, boasting about this week’s sale of billions of dollars in debt used to purchase the social network, whose finances have improved recently. “It’s almost like I’m good with money,” he wrote.
In Doge’s early meetings, some of those involved favoured starting with a deregulation drive, worrying that an attack on government spending would — unlike at a private company — be quickly frustrated by bureaucracy, legal challenges and Congress’s constitutional authority over funding, known as the “power of the purse”.
But the apparent seizure of this power with the swift cancellation of already-earmarked funds at USAID and elsewhere did not provoke even a murmur of complaint from House majority leader Mike Johnson, who welcomed Doge’s interventions in a press conference this week as “a long overdue and much welcome development”.
“When Congress funds an agency, they give broad discretion to the executive branch on how it’s administered,” Johnson, a firm Trump ally, said. “They’re using that authority right now in a way it hasn’t been used in a long time. So, it looks radical, [but] it’s not.”
Those who have tried to get in the way of Doge’s plans, or raised legal questions, have not lasted long. David Lebryk, who spent more than 35 years at the Treasury and was briefly in charge while Scott Bessent was awaiting confirmation, quit after Musk’s team demanded access to review the department’s multitrillion-dollar payments system.
“If this was really a typical review, why the extreme urgency and disgraceful treatment of an exceptional federal executive,” says Don Hammond, a former longtime Treasury official.
Musk has also used X, on which he has more than 216mn followers, to lash out at Doge’s critics and boast of its work. He threatened to report those who revealed names of the department’s staffers to law enforcement, leading the Trump appointee for US attorney in Washington to assure Musk that he would use his authority “against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people”.
Though Doge has moved swiftly, its plans have met some resistance. As of Thursday, only 60,000 federal workers had accepted its buyout offer, well short of the hundreds of thousands the White House predicted.
The perils of recruiting relatively inexperienced Doge staffers became apparent when 25-year-old Marko Elez, who had been granted access to the US Treasury’s payments network, was forced to resign after racist social media posts were unearthed.
After days of Musk dominating the headlines, Trump himself suggested there were limits to the billionaire’s powers, telling reporters that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.” But on Friday, he praised the “great job” Musk was doing “finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste.”
Some of the legal challenges against Doge have also made headway, with a federal judge barring Elon Musk from being handed US Treasury data on Thursday, and a court in Massachusetts temporarily extending the employee buyout deadline.
But even on an accelerated timeline, the wheels of the US justice system are turning more slowly than Musk’s Silicon Valley-inspired efficiency drive.
Labour organisations are seeking an emergency restraining order to prevent Doge from accessing labour department systems, but warned that Doge can gain “access to sensitive systems before courts can stop them” and dismantle agencies before Congress can assert its prerogatives in the federal budget”, as well as intimidate employees.
“They are finding technicalities to work their way around the law,” says Richard Painter, who was George W Bush’s chief ethics lawyer. “They’re finding loopholes to exercise presidential power in unprecedented ways.”
Musk would need to “divest from a lot or recuse from a lot” to avoid falling foul of conflict-of-interest laws that govern federal employees, Painter adds. But enforcing such rules would fall to Trump’s Department of Justice, which has already demonstrated its loyalty to the president’s agenda with a series of memos designed to pursue his enemies.
Constraints on Musk’s power are more likely to come from the Trump administration’s competing priorities. Doge has yet to take aim at social security and Medicaid payments on which tens of millions of Americans rely or at the Department of Defense, which together account for the largest chunk of federal spending.
Trump has vowed to not touch welfare benefits in “any way, shape or form”, while the Republican-led Congress is highly unlikely to sanction significant cuts to the Pentagon’s budget.
Musk himself has hinted that his next targets could be the Department of Education, which Trump has previously vowed to eliminate, the Internal Revenue Service, and US weapon procurement.
The arrival to the White House of Russell Vought, the new head of the Office of Management and Budget who has spent years outlining how the executive branch can seize the power of the purse from Congress, could supercharge Doge’s efforts.
“Obviously I’m thrilled with the progress, both the direction and the speed,” Musk associate Rabois says of the first weeks of the second Trump term. “Just wait until [Trump] has all of his barrels in place.”