Elon Musk is gone but DOGE isn’t done laying off government workers and trying to “create significant efficiencies”

Elon Musk may have left Washington DC to refocus on his business ventures, but his brainchild, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, continues to go about its work.

While President Donald Trump didn’t extend the tech billionaire’s position as a ‘special government employee’, a time-limited role, several others that joined up with DOGE have been made full-time federal workers. The current director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, told the House Appropriations Committee that the goal is to make DOGE “more institutionalized” within the agencies.

Vought has stepped in to take over the running of DOGE operations after the White House signed an executive order extending the agency’s work until at least the summer of 2026. However, he said that “the leadership of DOGE is now much more decentralized.”

DOGE lives on without Musk

While some prominent names that followed Musk to Washington like Steve Davis and Katie Miller have since left, there are over three dozen DOGE-affiliated people that have become fully embedded at the General Services Administration reports NPR.

There are others “working almost as in-house consultants as a part of the agency’s leadership,” according to Vought like former oil executive and DOGE representative Tyler Hassen. He is working at the Department of Interior under Secretary Doug Burgum to “create significant efficiencies.”

An Interior employee told NPR that “Hassen is the guy making all of the decisions.”

While Musk set a goal of reducing government spending by $2 trillion, he later had to downsize that target cutting it in half. By the time he left Washington, DOGE reported that it had only cut around $175 billion in wasteful and fraudulent government spending.

However, those numbers have been widely criticized for being full of errors and an analysis of DOGE actions found that the cost-cutting agency may have cost taxpayers an estimated $135 billion so far.

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