Lambert here: A fine summary of publicly known DOGE activities through March, 2025.
On January 20, 2025, after the DOGE Executive Order was signed, DOGE team members, including current and former employees of Musk in the private sector, arrived at the Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) and moved into the area including the office of the OPM Director. DOGE locked senior career civil servants out of OPM computer systems that contain datasets related to the federal workforce. On January 23, 2025, OPM announced that it was testing a new capability to communicate with all federal employees.
On January 24, 2025, DOGE announced on X that in the first 80 hours of its operation, it had canceled “approx. $420M of current/impending contracts” and two federal government leases, with a focus “mainly on DEI contracts and unoccupied buildings.” J.R. 115. From January 27 to February 7, 2025, DOGE teams began operating at the United States Departments of Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services (“HHS”), Transportation, and Veterans Affairs; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”); the CFPB; and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
DOGE has taken numerous actions without any apparent advanced approval by agency leadership. At the Department of Education, DOGE reportedly made almost all of the decisions about “what grants and contracts to cancel and which employees to put on leave, without seeking or considering input from political appointees.” J.R. 581. Political appointees were reportedly “caught off guard” when on February 7, 2025, DOGE executed cuts to billions of dollars of funding from the National Institutes of Health to universities and research organizations. J.R. 582. After DOGE team members reportedly terminated personnel at the Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) and the Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration (“NNSA”), USDA and NNSA had to work to rescind the firings of some of its essential personnel involved in combating bird flu and safeguarding nuclear weapons, respectively. Similarly, at the Cabinet meeting, Musk specifically admitted that at USAID, DOGE mistakenly cancelled funding for Ebola prevention. The former Chief Financial Officer of FEMA has submitted a declaration stating that, based upon her observation of the events on February 10, 2025 relating to a sudden change in FEMA policy to restrict the sending of certain resources to state and local governments, including a contemporaneous announcement of the change by Musk on X, she has concluded that the decision was made not by FEMA leadership, but by Musk or DOGE.
On February 20, 2025, DOGE reportedly put a $1 spending limit on government credit cards used at the General Services Administration (“GSA”), OPM, CFPB, and USAID. This action pre-dated Executive Order 14,222, signed by President Trump on February 26, 2025, which directed that “all credit cards held by agency employees shall be treated as frozen for 30 days from the date of this order.” Exec. Order No. 14,222, 90 Fed. Reg. at 11,095.
On February 22, 2025 at 2:46 p.m., Musk posted on X that consistent with President Trump’s instructions to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” and that the “[f]ailure to respond will be taken as resignation.” J.R. 611, 702. Less than three hours later, the email was sent. Subsequently, OPM informed agency leaders that their employees were not required to respond, and certain agency heads directed employees not to respond.
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