Their work has been shrouded in secrecy, conducted on Signal and at SpaceX offices a few blocks from the White House. Team members have been dispatched to federal agencies to review them for cuts. And Elon Musk, their leader and the world’s richest man, continues to be at President-elect Donald Trump’s side.
What is called the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive, has functioned in its early day as a government-reform task force, with DOGE breakout teams looking for ways to reduce spending, pare back the federal workforce and reorganize and downsize agencies.
DOGE is expected to work closely with the Office of Management and Budget, making recommendations to Congress and the Trump administration on ways to bring down spending and cut regulations.
DOGE officials have focused on ways that their goals can be accomplished through executive action as opposed to legislatively, people familiar with the matter said.
Some of DOGE’s early work has involved reviewing past audits of federal agencies, to help guide the work and identify potential cuts and inefficiencies, one of the people said. The Defense Department, for example, has failed several audits in a row and struggled to fully account for its budget.
“They are trying to keep their eyes on executive changes and regulatory changes rather than legislative ones,” said Romina Boccia, the director of Budget and Entitlement Policy with the Cato Institute and the author of a Substack called “The Debt Dispatch.”
Musk and DOGE are likely to have an office on the White House campus at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, placing the tech mogul a short walk from the Oval Office, according to a person familiar with the plans.
A representative for the Trump transition team didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Musk initially suggested that DOGE would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget but recently appeared to lower expectations in an interview this month, saying, “if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.” He referred to the $2 trillion goal as a “best-case outcome.”
The timetable of the potential cuts hasn’t been clear but they would represent a significant portion of federal spending, which reached $6.75 trillion in the most recent fiscal year ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Some Democrats and unions have expressed wariness about the group, questioning its plans for trims to federal workers or broad budget cuts that could reduce services and the functioning of government.
“No matter who someone voted for in this election, everyone should be worried sick about this so-called DOGE,” said Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union which represents 110,000 federal workers. “They want legitimacy without the transparency and accountability that comes with a government-run group of this kind.”
The day-to-day operations of DOGE have been led by Steve Davis, the president of the Boring Co., Musk’s tunneling company, according to people familiar with the matter. Former Uber Chief Business Officer Emil Michael had been overseeing work to cut regulations, according to people familiar with the discussions, but is now Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. Brad Smith, a healthcare executive, has been serving in the role of a chief of staff, the people said.
Baris Akis, co-founder of Human Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm, has been part of the incoming administration’s transition team at the Treasury Department and has worked with DOGE, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Healthcare entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who was chosen by Trump to work with Musk on DOGE, is under consideration to fill Vice President-elect JD Vance’s Senate seat in Ohio, making his future role on the panel unclear.
As part of the process, SpaceX scouted locations in the nation’s capital for a secure facility where Musk and other DOGE staffers could review highly classified information, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
In an indication of DOGE’s broad span across the federal government, Trump named William McGinley to serve as DOGE’s counsel. McGinley, who served as White House cabinet secretary in Trump’s first administration, was initially the incoming president’s choice to serve as White House counsel for the second term.
Much of the team was assembled by volunteers who sifted through applications submitted over X, Musk’s social-media site. Members of the early DOGE team have been communicating across Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
In a blog post, Vinay Hiremath, the co-founder of Loom, a video-messaging service, described his brief foray volunteering with the group.
“Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said ‘yes.’ Then he said ‘cool’ and I was in multiple Signal groups,” Hiremath wrote. “The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.”
Hiremath declined to be interviewed for this article.
Trump has given DOGE a deadline of July 4, 2026—when the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary and four months before the midterm elections—to complete its work.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-federal-reform-musk-ramaswamy-118a3833?st=avnmwt
