From the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has passed several times, leading from time to time to claims-most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management-that this group does not exist, or has completely disappeared.
But DOGE is not dead. Many of its original members serve full-time in various government positions, and the National Design Studio (NDS) is led by Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia, who is a close friend of Musk.
Even if DOGE doesn’t survive another year, or until the US semiquincentennial—its actual expiration date, according to the executive order that created it—the organization’s massive project will continue. The DOGE from its inception was used for two purposes, both of which have continued rapidly: the destruction of the administrative state and the complete integration of data in the service of concentrating power in the executive branch. It’s a pattern experts say could spill beyond the Trump administration.
“I think it’s changed norms about where legislative power ends and where executive power begins to ignore those norms,” said Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “This won’t be limited to Republican administrations. There will be future Democratic presidents who will say, ‘Well, the DOGE was able to do this, why can’t we?’
Early days of DOGE was characterized by chaotic chaos in which small groups of DOGE employees, such as the infamous Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, spread throughout government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing employees, and terminating contracts. And while these measures were often intense, if not seen as illegal, as matters of bureaucratic efficiency, they served what was the Trump administration’s agenda all along.
Goals such as discretionary spending and drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce were already being pushed by people like vice president JD Vance, who in 2021 called for the “Ba’athification” of the government, and Russell Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These goals were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought was not the end, but the means—its unique understanding was that controlling the technological infrastructure, something that could be accomplished with a small group, was practically equivalent to controlling the government.
“Never before has a branch of government been given so much power to upend government agencies with so little oversight,” Moynihan said.
Under the Constitution, the authority to establish and fund federal agencies comes from Congress. But Trump and many of his supporters, including Vought and Vance, cling to what was until recently a narrow view of how government should be run: the federal theory of governance. This states that, as the CEO of the company, the president has complete control over the executive branch, where government agencies are part-powers similar to those of the king rather than the number defined in the founding documents of the nation.
