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“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” screamed Elon Musk, wielding the power tool before a cheering crowd at a rightwing political conference. The tech titan promised to slice and dice the US federal government and save taxpayers a trillion dollars. Oozing confidence, the world’s richest person seemed unstoppable.
That was February. Last week Musk announced that he is hanging up his chainsaw and stepping back from his role overseeing the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, to focus on Tesla, his beleaguered electric vehicle company. The news led some to hope the chaos unleashed by Doge is finally waning.
But it is just as possible that the relative lull presages a new, more dangerous phase. While Musk intends to reduce his schedule, he also said he would continue to work for Donald Trump for “the remainder of the president’s term”. On Friday CNN reported that Doge is building a master database to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants by combining sensitive data from across the federal government.
“It’s well established that they’re using the data not just to cut spending but to advance policy goals,” said Judd Legum, the author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter that maintains a Doge tracker. “As they realise there’s nothing left to cut that they want to cut or can cut, they’ll probably turn to more of those more policy-oriented initiatives.”
Doge was created by an executive order that Trump signed on his first day in office on 20 January to “modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”. But its mandate – due to expire on 4 July 2026 – soon broadened as its staffers sweep through government departments looking for spending and staff cuts.
The Doge team is small, with about 79 appointed employees and 10 employees seconded from other agencies. Many of the staffers are young software engineers who are current and former employees in Musk companies. They have little to no experience inside the government.
The team have flouted the constitution to drive cuts in parts of the federal bureaucracy, hollowing out some agencies and sowing panic among much of the government workforce. More than 260,000 federal workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early, according to a tally by the Reuters news agency.
Doge members have entered more than 20 government agencies, gaining access to computer systems that contain personal data of past and present federal workers and millions more Americans. Their abrupt actions, such as the plan to cut biomedical research funding, have faced resistance from both Republicans and the courts, with some moves being swiftly blocked.
Even so, the collateral damage has been devastating.
Social security, a bulwark of the welfare system dating back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, has reportedly been hit by regional office closures, website crashes and some recipients – mainly immigrants – being declared dead in a scheme designed to pressure them into leaving the US.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which protects Americans from unscrupulous lenders, has been shut down and many of its employees received termination notices. The CFPB has investigated claims about loan policies at Tesla, raising questions about conflicts of interest.
The US Institute of Peace (USIP), a congressionally created and funded thinktank, was another target, culminating in a tense standoff when employees blocked Doge members from entering the institute’s headquarters, which are not government property. Doge staff eventually gained access in part with the help of the Washington police.
George Moose, 80, the institute’s acting president, locked himself inside his office in protest. Andrew Cheatham, who was a senior adviser for disruptive technologies and global policy at USIP, recalled: “To his great credit he was making the last stand against this. The police and FBI and whomever escorted him out that day. It was quite shameful. This man had dedicated his whole life to diplomacy.”
Cheatham, 45, a lawyer who worked at the United Nations for 10 years in New York, Iraq and Libya, was among staff fired by email. He added: “Elon Musk has the nerve to tweet that USIP was helping support terrorists. I’ve put my own personal life in danger in 27 post-ISIS cities. He has no earthly idea what it means to try to prevent extremism, terrorism and violence in this world.”
Cheatham warned that Musk’s approach of treating government like the private sector is disastrous. “It’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to this country in modern history since the civil war, this absolute destruction of the state,” he said.
“You can’t be a person subject to this and not see how arbitrary, capricious, vengeful and hateful are the means by which they dismiss everyone and cast them aside. No one would ever want any organisation, private or public, to treat people like that.”
The people most affected by Doge’s efforts so far have been recipients of foreign aid. It largely shut down the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, cancelling more than 80% of its humanitarian programmes. Almost all of the agency’s employees will be fired by September and all its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the state department. Musk boasted on his X social media platform: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
In a presentation earlier this month at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) thinktank in Washington, senior fellow Nat Malkus said the USAID cuts represented 40% of all contracts cancelled and 73% of actual savings made by Doge as of 23 March. This far outstripped contracts and savings at the Department of Health and Human Services (9% and 6%), Department of the Interior (7% and 1%) and every other department.
But having plucked the low hanging fruit, Doge now appears to be slowing down and moving on to smaller agencies. Its emails demanding that employees list “five things” they accomplished have fizzled while Musk has faced greater pushback from Trump’s cabinet secretaries. In an interview at the AEI, Malkus characterised Doge’s “appetite for destruction” as “pretty high” but said: “It appears that the blitzkrieg stage has sort of wound down.”
The volume and complexity of Doge’s can be overwhelming, making it difficult for the public and even experts to fully analyse and verify the claimed results. Malkus, whose background is in education policy, said: “The transparency can starve you when it’s not there and it can drown you when it is there.”
He spends 15-20 hours per week analysing Doge’s online list of terminated contracts or “wall of receipts” and has found “some sloppiness” in Doge’s numbers, he said, including when it mistakenly listed a contract at $8bn that was actually worth only $8m.
“They’re doing a lot of stuff fast so they’re going to make some mistakes. We often depend on the government to give out reliable numbers and we penalise them when they give shoddy numbers. If that’s the benchmark for Doge, they’ve got a lot of penalties coming their way.”
Doge’s website currently claims that it has made savings for the taxpayer of $160bn, a figure that critics say is inflated. Malkus added: “Only a portion of that is listed item by item – somewhere around $60bn. So there’s some questions about the things that they post and two thirds of their saving they don’t have anything posted. It’s a fool’s errand to guess what it is.”
Musk, who has reportedly clashed with cabinet members including treasury secretary Scott Bessent, this week announced a significant reduction in his time spent on Doge, shifting his attention back to Tesla due to investor concerns. Tesla struggled to sell vehicles as it faced angry protests over Musk’s actions. The company reported a 71% drop in profits and a 9% decline in revenue for the first quarter.
Experts believe that Doge, which has shown little appetite for making cuts at the Pentagon, will fall dramatically short of its $1tn target and that it might even end up costing more than it saves. Fears also persist that it will use its access to sensitive government data to build centralised systems that benefit both Musk’s business interests and Trump’s far right agenda.
CNN reported that Doge is developing a comprehensive database to enhance immigration enforcement. The initiative aims to consolidate sensitive information from various federal agencies, including the IRS and Social Security Administration. Its goal is to create “targeting lists” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to expedite the identification and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Palantir, a data analytics company, is assisting in building this system, CNN said. Concerns have been raised by congressional Democrats and privacy advocates regarding the legality and potential for misuse of centralised data. A former senior IRS employee with knowledge of the plans was quoted by CNN as saying: “If they are designing a deportation machine, they will be able to do that.”
Chris Scott, a Democratic strategist who was Kamala Harris’s coalitions director in last year’s election campaign, rejected the notion that the Doge storm has passed.
“Unfortunately, with anything with this administration and what it started, even when it dies out for a little bit, I don’t take it as they have quit,” he said. “They retool and they reassess their approach. They feel like this is something that’s very effective. They’re reassessing how to go about it in their next phase.”
