The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which launched an unprecedented assault to cut back the public sector as President Donald Trump stepped back into the White House in January, no longer exists, with eight months to go on its mandate, Reuters has reported.
Newsweek contacted the White House for comment via email after office hours.
Why It Matters
DOGE, initially led by billionaire Elon Musk, spearheaded the Trump administration’s drive to shrink the role of government, to the delight of conservatives and to the horror of Democrats who condemned the cost-cutting campaign as hasty and wasteful.
What To Know
DOGE was created by Trump through an executive order to improve efficiency and reduce waste in the federal government.
In October 2024, Musk said he could cut $2 trillion from government spending, about one-third of the federal budget, but he appeared to walk it back in January 2025. During an interview on his social media website X, formerly Twitter, he said $2 trillion was a “best-case outcome,” but there was a “good shot” of reaching half that target.
Musk took to the job with relish. In early February, he told his followers on X that he could have gone to some great parties but instead “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He later appeared at a conservative gathering wielding a chain saw, representing his drive to cut spending. Musk left the administration in May.
The head of the federal government’s main human resources agency, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE, told Reuters that DOGE was no longer a “centralized entity.”
“That doesn’t exist,” Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE’s status.
Kupor also said a government-wide hiring freeze, a hallmark of the DOGE push to shrink government, is also over. “There is no target around reductions” anymore, he said.
In September, the General Services Administration asked hundreds of former employees who were pushed out during DOGE cost-cutting to return to their jobs.
Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists, but Trump and his team have signaled its demise in recent months, even though the president signed an executive order earlier in his term decreeing that DOGE would last through July 2026, Reuters reported.
Trump, in statements to reporters, often talked about DOGE in the past tense and at least two prominent DOGE employees were now involved in other bodies set up by the administrations, the news agency said.
However, DOGE was still reporting its activities on X. On Sunday, it said that over the past nine days it had “terminated and descoped 78 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $1.9B and savings of $335M.”
The Partnership for Public Service nonprofit said that as of November 18, its data indicated that more than 211,000 civil servants had left the world force through firings, forced relocations and a “deferred resignation” program, “often in a haphazard and chaotic manner.”
What People Are Saying
The Partnership for Public Service says on its website: “One of the defining features of the Trump administration’s approach to governance, and the mission of the Department of Government Efficiency, has been the deliberate dismantling of the federal workforce…. This campaign to weaken the federal civil service has targeted the very people who keep our government running and provide essential services that we all rely on every day.”
What Happens Next
Even if DOGE no longer exists, the administration’s campaign to push back the role of government and to slash regulations remains intact.
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