Has DOGE Already Lost Its Way?

Much cutting. Very waste. But the Department of Government Efficiency might not have the legal and budgetary chops to actually reduce spending.

A few weeks after the presidential election, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made a bold promise: They would team up to slash bureaucracy and cut trillions of dollars in federal spending.

Through the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the pair promised to tackle "the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end," the pair promised in a joint op-ed printed in The Wall Street Journal.

"We are entrepreneurs, not politicians," they claimed. "We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."

More than two weeks into the second Trump administration, the situation has evolved considerably. Most obviously, Ramaswamy is no longer attached to the DOGE project, leaving Musk as the sole leader. Rather than being a volunteer working from outside the government, Musk now has an office in the White House, where the newly minted DOGE reports directly to Trump. And while the DOGE does seem to be aggressively targeting wasteful spending in the executive branch, it remains quite unclear whether those efforts will survive inevitable court challenges and whether the federal budget will actually decline (or at least grow less quickly) as a result. 

The main problem in assessing the DOGE project at this point is that so much is unknown—and that much of that opacity seems to be intentional. Even the most basic things like the legal limits of Musk's role and how many staff are working for the DOGE remain unclear. More complicated questions like how much wasteful spending has been cut and whether those cuts can survive legal and congressional challenges are completely unknown. Indeed, even the most foundational aspect of what DOGE is doing—using presidential authority to block spending Congress has authorized—is on shaky legal footing. Musk is obviously moving quickly and causing a great deal of alarm within the administrative state, but it is hard to tell whether he's slashing government, breaking things, or merely putting on a big show for Trump's fans in the media and online.

Here's what we do know: The DOGE's mandate has already shifted significantly—to the point where it looks more like a more aggressive version of a Barack Obama–era project meant to streamline and digitize bureaucracy rather than the budget-cutting entity originally promised. 

That might be a worthwhile goal, of course, and one that could give the president more direct control over the federal government's extensive contracting systems. But it is a considerably different one than the bold promise Musk made during the final stages of the presidential campaign: that DOGE would find $2 trillion in budget cuts. 

Ramaswamy said last week that his departure from the DOGE was due to a difference in vision. Whereas he wanted to focus on cutting federal regulations and working with Congress to cut spending, as he and Musk noted in their Journal op-ed, he said the department has now "evolved from a focus on legal constitutional issues" to a focus on digital technology.

Has the DOGE already lost its way? Or has Musk shaped it into a scalpel that will ultimately prove more effective? Could it be both?

From Meme to the White House

Unofficially, the DOGE was born on August 19, when Musk tweeted an AI-generated image of his likeness standing behind a podium labeled "Department of Government Efficiency." "I am willing to serve," he wrote in the post, an apparent nod to some off-the-cuff remarks made by Trump a few days earlier. 

Officially, however, new government agencies cannot simply spring from the foreheads of their fathers. After Trump won the election, and it became clear he was serious about appointing Musk (and Ramaswamy) to lead an IRL version of what had started as a campaign trail meme, there was widespread speculation about exactly what form the new entity would take.

On January 20, the country got the answer. Amid a flurry of Inauguration Day executive orders, Trump signed an order establishing the DOGE and gave it a mandate to "implement the President's DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity." To achieve those goals, the DOGE was empowered to place teams of people within other federal agencies and departments to "improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems."

As a practical matter, the DOGE took over the White House resources previously directed to the U.S. Digital Service, an entity created by the Obama administration with the goal of digitizing and modernizing governmental operations.

That executive order "resulted in a significant narrowing of the DOGE's mission, away from sweeping regulatory and budget cuts, toward a much narrower focus on tech modernization," James Broughel, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. (While some of Broughel's colleagues have had direct meetings with DOGE staff, Broughel characterized his view of the new agency as solely that of an observer.)

Despite the narrower purview, Musk and the DOGE have certainly been busy. Musk's targets are the government's payment systems—in the Treasury Department and elsewhere—and federal payrolls. Working alongside the White House's Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the DOGE has offered buyouts to huge swaths of federal bureaucrats.

There's still no official list of who works in the DOGE or any idea of how many are full-time employees. There also remain serious and unresolved questions about the legality of Musk's role as the head of DOGE—while he concurrently serves as CEO of SpaceX (a government contractor) and Tesla—and his authority to access and direct federal spending without so much as a Senate confirmation under his belt. 

Musk has also done a great job of promoting the DOGE's work on social media, where he has claimed to be cutting the deficit by about $1 billion a day—though there is no way to verify that claim, for now, in the absence of budget documents or independent assessments by the likes of the Congressional Budget Office. 

Some of those claims have stretched the truth too. On Wednesday, for example, Musk (and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt) touted shutting off $8 million that allegedly flowed from the U.S. government to Politico, a news outlet, over the course of 10 years. Those payments were subscriptions to Politico Pro, a premium service for policy professionals in both the private and public sectors that includes legislative tracking and other functions that some government workers might find beneficial.

Are all those subscriptions necessary? Probably not. Could some of that spending be curtailed? Almost certainly. But the existence of that spending is not a major scandal and $8 million (over 10 years) is a laughably small cut anyway. 

'The Mission Change Is Real'

Broadly, two views of the DOGE have emerged. 

On one hand, Musk rapidly seizing control of government payment systems has caused an uproar—both from those who applaud his efforts and those who believe it is an unconstitutional (or at least illegal) power grab.

"In the history of how to reform government, no one to my knowledge suggested getting hold of the systems controlling personnel and payments," Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, posted on X this week. "Obvious in retrospect but [a] totally new play."

Others applauding Musk include Mick Mulvaney, the former White House chief of staff and former congressman. A longtime advocate of shrinking government, Mulvaney argued in The Hill this week that "DOGE, which, in fairness started as little more than a well-oiled public relations campaign, is now a real part of the federal government." 

However, Mulvaney also admits that critics like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) have a point when they say the DOGE project lacks statutory authority for the moves it seems to be making. 

So, in fairness, it may not be a "real part of the federal government" at all. And that uncertainty colors everything the DOGE is doing. 

It seems inevitable that whatever control or oversight of federal spending the DOGE seizes will be subject to legal challenges. In part, that will depend on the Trump administration's ability to convince courts that the president can impound spending—that is, simply refuse to spend dollars that Congress has appropriated.

Provoking those legal challenges seems to be part of the plan. Under the terms of the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the president isn't allowed to do that. Russ Vought, the new director of the OMB, has been open about his willingness to challenge that law's constitutionality. The outcome of that fight will likely determine how much of the DOGE cuts can stick.

In practice, Musk can claim to have shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), but unless the courts and/or Congress go along with it, it hasn't happened. The president can audit, reform, manage, and otherwise exercise supervisory authority over the agency. He cannot simply shut down government programs unilaterally.

That makes it impossible to know, for now, what cuts will be lasting—and, ultimately, whether Congress will go along with any plans to reduce current spending (via impoundment) or future spending (by passing budgets that actually make cuts).

That lack of long-term certainty is what animates the other emerging view of the DOGE project. For those who are seriously concerned about the federal budget and rapidly accumulating national debt, firing some bureaucrats and slashing foreign aid—a puny part of federal spending—is a distraction from the real issues. Federal health spending (including Medicare and Medicaid), Social Security, defense spending, and interest on the national debt consume more than two-thirds of the nearly $7 trillion federal budget. 

Certainly, cutting some wasteful spending is better than continuing to spend wastefully. Still, the context matters. Cutting a few billion in government contracts or staffing costs is next to nothing in a federal budget that totals nearly $7 trillion—that's $7,000 billion.

Even if Musk somehow managed to slash the federal work force by 20 percent, that would only save $60 billion. An extremely successful effort to trim mistaken payments might save $80 billion, but even these are relatively small figures given the enormity of federal spending, especially since Musk initially touted $2 trillion in savings. 

And that assumes those cuts aren't blocked by courts, and that Congress doesn't immediately restore them in the next budget.

Regardless of how that plays out, it points toward a much smaller role than the one Musk told voters he would play in cutting spending and reducing the size of government. The new, more narrowly tailored the DOGE is better thought of as an attempt to revamp the administrative state through improved technology and a culture shift driven by Musk's experience in the private sector, to the frustration of some people who have met with DOGE staffers in recent weeks, who say the goals seem less ideological and less interested in budgetary and spending issues. 

Broughel says that "some media outlets appear reluctant to recognize this shift," something he chalks up to Musk's and the DOGE's aggressive social media campaign highlighting wasteful government spending. "The mission change is real, however, and highlights the limitations of executive action without congressional support." 

Cuts or Chaos?

With so much uncertainty still surrounding the DOGE, probably the best way to regard its efforts is through the narrowest—and most obviously lawful—part of its mandate. 

That is, to see it as a rebranded and upgraded version of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), which is what Trump's executive order plainly authorized. In that role, DOGE won't be able to single-handedly cut trillions of dollars, without congressional approval via legislation. But it can still do a lot of good. 

"The 'how' of government is profoundly broken, and it needs to get fixed," says Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Pahlka helped launch the USDS when it was founded by the Obama administration in 2014 and has a unique perspective on whatever it is that Musk is trying to accomplish from his catbird seat in the White House. She's a Democrat and says she likely wouldn't be friends with Musk and is unlikely to cheer many of the policy changes that the Trump administration is pursuing. 

Still, as someone who moved from the tech industry into the government with a mandate to make the federal bureaucracy more like the rest of the world in the 21st century—digital, efficient, and altogether less ossified—she has great interest in the DOGE's stated goals of greater efficiency. And she's rooting for positive changes, even if they seem far-fetched.

"I've come to believe that change doesn't happen painlessly," Pahlka told Reason in an interview last week. "My positive vision is that the disruption they will bring is of a nature that creates room for something more fit for the 21st century, more suited to the challenges that government needs to be addressing these days, and that takes a big chunk out of the sclerosis of our government." 

She tempers that optimism with a warning about the inevitable tradeoffs. "Even in the best-case scenario, there's this interim period where I think some bad stuff can happen. Like, you know, you can mess with Twitter and you might risk it going down—but, who cares, right? No one is going to die."

"You mess with government systems in the same way and some bad stuff is going to happen, and I think it remains to be seen whether the bad stuff ends up being in proportion to the opportunity that this disruption creates," she says.

Almost three weeks in, there can be no doubt that Musk's instinct to "move fast and break things" is on full display within the DOGE. Whether that mentality can work in the stodgy world of bureaucracy remains to be seen. Even less certain is whether Musk's role in the White House translates into serious budget cuts, or merely unleashes chaos within the executive branch. 

Things are happening quickly, and Pahlka's view is already shifting toward the latter. In a follow-up email on Wednesday, she expressed a more pessimistic view of what the DOGE has been up to. "I would just say that my concern is Musk's motivation. Is his ultimate goal a better, leaner government, and sees the current chaos as creative destruction? Or is he after something so fundamentally different that it doesn't respect the foundations our government is built on?"

Good questions, and ones that the Trump administration ought to answer.

Today's Republican Party is organized around Trump's whims. And the DOGE is in many ways a creature of those whims. But under the Constitution's separation of powers, only Congress has the power of the purse—which means the power to spend, and to not spend. 

So in the end it will be up to Congress, working with the executive branch, to pass a budget that actually reduces government spending. Until that happens, the DOGE will be, at best, a sideshow—albeit one that libertarians might have a good, if tentative, reason to cheer.