Goodbye to DOGE: Why did the Trump Administration shut down the Department of Government Efficiency?
Elon Musk’s federal agency, which was established with great fanfare at the start of Trump’s second term, has been quietly disbanded before mandate expires.
Trump’s biggest campaign donor in 2024, Elon Musk, was tapped to head up a government-wide effort to “reduce waste, fraud and abuse” through the Department of Government Efficiency. Better known as DOGE, the agency was established with great fanfare in January and given a charter to operate through July 2026.
However, DOGE has been quietly disbanded with Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor telling Reuters earlier this month: “That doesn’t exist” adding that it is no longer a “centralized entity.” These were the first public statements confirming prior signaling of the agency’s demise.
DOGE employees began moving out of offices in June
Musk abandoned Washington DC in May after sacking hundreds of thousands of federal employees and getting tens of thousands more to take buyouts to leave. In total around 300,000 people have left government service since the start of the Trump administration.
The agency’s running roughshod through government agencies drew the ire of the American public and backlash against Musk with people taking their frustration out on Tesla, a company of which he is the CEO.
DOGE claimed that it had saved taxpayers tens of billions, Musk had previously promised to cut $2 trillion in expenditure, but the real figure is difficult to calculate. Despite Musk saying that he didn’t “know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization,” it hasn’t provided detailed public accounting of its work.
Signs that the tech billionaire’s brainchild was being swept under the rug came this summer when DOGE staffers began packing up their clothes and bedding at the offices they were operating out of, and sleeping at as well. The move came after Trump and Musk had a tremendously ugly public feud over social media that was sparked by the Republican president’s ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’.
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