Headed by Musk, named after an internet meme and administered, in large part, by mysterious twentysomething engineers, DOGE in 100 days has reshaped Washington, hobbling its longstanding institutions as the world’s richest man brings a chainsaw to a bureaucracy he claims is rife with “waste, fraud and abuse.”
DOGE has cut a wide swath — shrinking the federal workforce to 1960s levels. But its impact in other ways has been more narrow than both supporters and detractors might realize. Government spending is actually increasing amid all the DOGE cuts, with notable exceptions including foreign aid and education.
“In a sense, it’s more successful than you might have thought, in a sense it’s less,” said an administration official close to DOGE who was granted anonymity to speak freely.
DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.
“In terms of downsizing, it’s unprecedented for sure,” said Richard Stern, a federal budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He noted that other government makeovers, like the New Deal and Great Society, had been larger — but that DOGE was unique because it is subtractive, not additive.
DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.
The operation was part planned, part improvised. Musk assembled a core team of around 40 staff even before the inauguration, most with backgrounds in engineering, venture capital or digital infrastructure, not public administration. The first month and a half of 2025 saw aggressive action.
Musk, a “special government employee” who still heads Tesla, SpaceX and X and has billions of dollars in federal contracts, faced almost no internal levers of scrutiny or accountability in those early days. With boundless resources and a direct line to the president, Musk wielded his accumulated power freely, appearing at Cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office alongside Trump.
And armed with the playbook he used to gut Twitter, Musk revved the chainsaw.
Elsewhere, DOGE made sweeping cuts that caught much of Washington off guard. The DOGE engineers relied on Musk’s mantra to cut 20 percent more than you needed and then add back: “If you’re not in pain, then you didn’t cut enough,” Musk is known to say. The “adding back” was constant: Nuclear power workers, those working on bird flu and regulators overseeing medical devices like heart implants were rehired after initial layoffs.
DOGE became the subject of at least five dozen lawsuits.
But even as DOGE loses its biggest advocate in Washington, it will continue to operate in a more decentralized model, with smaller teams embedded within agencies to carry out reductions in force and efficiency missions.
Agencies including the Departments of Interior, Commerce and Veterans Affairs are still preparing to conduct reductions in force after offering two rounds of deferred resignations.
But notably, administration officials don’t expect massive layoffs at the Pentagon, the biggest agency that has remained largely untouched. In some cases, departments are holding back approvals for deferred resignation programs to avoid losing critical staff.
Meanwhile, a core group of DOGE staffers is pushing forward on another major project: building a consolidated immigration and citizenship database to track migrants entering the country and allow government officials to more easily identify and deport them, several officials said. That endeavor, if successful, could reorient federal immigration enforcement for decades.
“Are you going to be able to reshape the government in order to be in a position to make it take them time to hire back to advance the deep state?” the person added. “That’s what’s important.”
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