Elon Musk’s prominent role in President Donald Trump’s White House appears to be fading, but the tech billionaire’s brainchild — the budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency — is poised to continue its work after his departure.
In less than four months, the DOGE effort has become embedded across the government — from personnel in key positions, to work already underway to remake agencies’ sometimes decades-old software systems, to a government-wide push to build a master database of sensitive personal data that would speed up immigration enforcement and help identify fraud in government payments.
Those staffers could be in place for months or years to come. Some are temporary — “special government employees,” the same title as Musk, and, like him, limited to working 130 days; or on contracts through September 30, the end of the fiscal year. Others are on renewable one-year agreements. And more have taken titles and roles that are typically considered permanent.
“There are so many of Elon’s people in already and they are not leaving, so the chaos will continue and nothing will change,” one General Services Administration employee with knowledge of the agency’s leadership told CNN.
Over the first four months of the Trump administration, DOGE has upended the federal government. At least 121,000 federal workers were laid off or targeted for layoffs in Trump’s first 100 days, and thousands more took buyout offers. Those workers, in interviews with CNN, have described confusion and upheaval, with many forced to return to offices or relocate to keep their jobs. Federal grants and programs have been slashed, and then at times reinstated after court challenges.
The Musk-led effort is a hybrid entity with tentacles everywhere, despite legal and political battles over the reach and limits of its authority. Bradley Humphreys, a senior Justice Department trial attorney, told a judge in March that its mission “is somewhat pervasive, and it’s hard for us to clearly define.”
What’s not yet clear is whether DOGE and the staffers it has placed within agencies will get their way — especially if they butt heads with Cabinet secretaries or face political blowback — without Musk in place to function as their heat shield. Already some secretaries, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have pushed back at what they saw as DOGE encroaching on their authority.
Musk, though, was also a lightning rod for criticism — and with him out of the picture, in some ways it could also be easier for DOGE’s work to proceed.
“The shock and awe blast he unleashed was a necessity on the front end, but there’s a natural point of diminishing returns that comes with that approach,” a senior agency official who works closely with DOGE team members told CNN, pointing to the lawsuits, Cabinet disputes and political liabilities that piled up during Musk’s months in Washington. “It’s no longer about authority and access — it’s about action, and taking away the klieg lights probably helps on net.”
Georgia Rep. Rep. Rich McCormick, a Republican who faced tough criticism from his constituents over Musk’s early actions, said he doesn’t expect the work of DOGE to change, aside from one key difference.
“It won’t be quite maybe so publicized,” McCormick said.
The gap Musk leaves
From the outset, DOGE was Musk’s brainchild — and its strategic initiatives and conceptual targets were driven by the tech billionaire, people familiar with his efforts said.
He holed up in an expansive conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across from the White House and occasionally appeared in the small, windowless West Wing office he was also given. Sometimes he slept in the office. A few times he slept in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House at Trump’s insistence. Mostly his living arrangements, schedule and travel logistics were guarded like classified national security information.
Musk fixated on issues big and small, real and imagined, some tethered to deeply researched government audits and reports and others attributable entirely to an X account that caught his attention.
Much like Musk, the DOGE team adhered to the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break stuff,” operating without the typical specific titles and government employment agreements.
They took a wide assortment of roles across agencies — senior advisers, chiefs of staff, chief information officers, general counsels and more — and at times, had roles at multiple agencies at once, with email accounts and security badges for each.
As Musk’s car company Tesla descended into turmoil, his relentless and less-than-collegial approach left him increasingly isolated in Trump’s orbit. Attention on DOGE’s efforts faded as Trump’s economic agenda moved increasingly into focus.
Musk told investors in April that he is stepping back from DOGE as he redirects his attention to Tesla. But he said he still plans to spend one to two days a week on government work, and his exact future role advising Trump — official or unofficial — remains unclear.
“The mission of DOGE — to cut waste, fraud, and abuse — will surely continue. DOGE employees who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient,” said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
Congressional allies of Musk insist that his departure has no bearing on the future of the agency.
“The momentum is there,” GOP Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, who co-leads the House DOGE caucus, told CNN. “The hardest part of anything is the first step and he’s done that. He’s been the rocket that has lifted DOGE into orbit. Now there comes a time where the rocket booster separates because the mission to break in Earth’s gravity has been completed. That’s what Elon has done. I still think he’s got the president’s ear.”
Although House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole acknowledged that the process with DOGE has sometimes been “bumpy” he said: “I think DOGE has performed a really useful function and I don’t think it’s going to disappear. I think it’s going to be, at least in the Trump years, sort of institutionalized.”
DOGE employees entrenched in agencies
The Trump administration has been vague about the size of DOGE and the scope of its efforts after Musk departs. An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that “DOGE is everywhere.” While the official would not identify the size of the DOGE workforce, that official said it “will be substantial.”
In a March interview, Musk told Fox Business that DOGE had about 100 staffers, which he hoped would increase to about 200.
Some members of the DOGE team have already been absorbed into more traditional positions within agencies, with more likely to follow.
“The title is irrelevant in the sense that they’re employees of the agency, and if their services are utilized in multiple ways in the agency, then sure, that’s fine,” the official said.
DOGE-aligned officials populate senior leadership positions across nearly every department and agency in the executive branch and, in some cases, atop those agencies outright.
Executives straight from Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, xAI and X or with close tech-world ties to Musk sit in complete control some of the critical, if largely unknown, nerve centers across Washington.
In the months since they’ve secured similar control atop or within the backbone of the government’s entitlement, revenue and assistance programs. In doing so, they’ve methodically identified and then sidelined, terminated or forced the retirement of top officials at the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Newly installed officials, almost without exception, immediately granted any stalled access to closely held secure information systems to DOGE engineers deployed across critical agencies — though in some cases such data access has been blocked by lawsuits.
They’ve sought to work around statutory requirements and agency regulations blocking the sharing of the reams of personal and financial data they’ve gained access to — and cite Trump’s executive orders as the legal basis for any actions they may take to do so.
In some cases, the combination of time and genuine necessity have led to a level of acceptance and a productive working relationship with career agency officials.
“They’ve opened up some data barriers that had been preventing the federal government from detecting improper payments and fraud,” Comptroller Gene Dodaro, the head of the Government Accountability Office, told lawmakers last week. “So there’s some benefits.”
Some DOGE team members who were initially skeptical of their government colleagues have evolved in their views.
“We actually have quite a lot of software talent on the ground – people writing code,” Sam Corcos, a health startup founder who joined the Treasury Department’s DOGE team, said in a rare March interview on Fox News. “We actually have a lot of good people.”
Corcos said he hadn’t experienced any backlash from career staffers and found them “super cooperative.”
But the role Musk-aligned officials have played in spearheading the mass reductions in the federal workforce has instilled a deep sense of distrust across it. The wave of cuts and buyouts represent the first phase of that effort, with larger future terminations planned.
Agencies were required to submit “Phase 2” reduction in force and full-scale reorganization plans to the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management last month. Those submissions were required to include each agency’s details for “competitive areas for subsequent large-scale” reductions in force that “should be planned for implementation by September 30, 2025,” according to a memo circulated to the heads of all departments and agencies.
Those agency submissions, which have been closely guarded by administration officials, are now part of a lawsuit seeking to compel their public release. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to reverse a lower court order that has blocked mass firings and major reorganizations at federal agencies.
A current employee at the Department of Education says that the tension that existed early on between DOGE and non-DOGE employees has grown even more powerful now, with DOGE leading the way, empowered to move without the rest of the team – creating a huge gulf between the two factions.
“They go about the work – they do stuff and then inform us later or we find out by the news,” this employee said of their DOGE counterparts in the office. “It is tense, and it is a weird environment.”
The employee also said DOGE staffers in the office walk by and “ignore” others in their office space. They shut their office doors and sometimes lock them.
“There is no sense they are trying to collaborate,” the employee said.
How DOGE took over Social Security
The Social Security Administration — an agency that handles Americans’ sensitive data and operates the federal government’s largest program, dispersing retirement, disability and survivor benefits — is a window into how Musk’s DOGE team has put down roots.
There, several members of the DOGE team with personal ties to Musk have taken prominent roles and used them to pursue Trump and Musk’s political agendas. Leland Dudek, then the agency’s acting commissioner, said at a meeting with advocates in early March that DOGE was calling the shots at Social Security, not him, attendees told CNN.
DOGE has embedded 11 staffers at the Social Security Administration in recent months, according to court documents. They include special government employees and detailees from other agencies. Some have end dates listed as September 30, while at least three have year-long agreements that are renewable.
The Trump administration projects the agreement between the agencies will cost more than $4.5 million, including nearly $3.7 million for salaries, $150,000 for travel and $735,000 for overhead, according to a court filing. It runs to the end of fiscal year 2025.
At least two of those affiliated with DOGE are now executives with the agency. Scott Coulter, who founded New York-based hedge fund Cowbird Capital, which closed last year, is the chief information officer. He took over the post earlier this year from Mike Russo, who moved into a senior adviser role. Russo served as chief technology officer at Shift4, which handled payment processing for Musk’s Starlink.
Also at Social Security is investor Antonio Gracias, a longtime friend of Musk who is a director at SpaceX and had served on Tesla’s board. The two appeared at a town hall in Wisconsin in late March, where Gracias talked about his efforts to find fraud at the agency. He pointed to a chart of more than 2 million non-citizens receiving Social Security numbers in 2024, saying without evidence that some of them had registered to vote.
Gracias is only one of two DOGE employees at the agency who have agreed to be identified, according to court documents. In other filings, former agency employees said that Coulter and Russo identified themselves as being part of DOGE.
The DOGE team is tasked with three projects, though they are running into hurdles in federal courts, which have blocked staffers from accessing Americans’ personal information in the agency’s databases. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift the ban so that DOGE can continue its mission of modernizing government information systems and combatting fraud and waste at the agency.
One effort, named the “Are You Alive?” project, seeks to make sure the agency’s records accurately reflect whether a person is alive or dead to root out improper payments and fraud that could be related to deceased individuals.
The Death Data Clean Up Project seeks to update the records of people the agency has sufficient confidence are deceased.
And the Fraud Detection Project looks for fraud in direct deposit information changes, wage reporting and new claims.
DOGE keeps its work at Social Security tightly controlled, according to a current employee who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. The DOGE team works in small groups and doesn’t invite many people to their meetings.
The employee said it’s likely that more experienced staffers, such as Coulter and Russo, will stick around to help new Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano and build out their teams.
But the impact of DOGE will last much longer.
“The ideas of DOGE will continue to be used as a cudgel to kind of blow things up and wreck established norms,” the employee said.
“We really tried to make Musk the enemy”
When an outside progressive group launched a poll to determine the next chapter of Democratic messaging against DOGE after Trump’s first 100 days, House Democratic leadership had a specific question they wanted included, according to two sources familiar with the process: What happens when Musk leaves?
Early on in Trump’s administration, Democrats targeted their blame for the DOGE chaos and cuts largely on Musk. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee commissioned a poster with Musk’s face on it that was plastered across Washington, DC, that read, “I am stealing from you.”
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren often refers to Musk as Trump’s “co-president.” Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost faced blowback from Republicans for consistently referring to Musk as “President Musk” during a February House Oversight committee hearing. And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a bill, entitled “Stop the Steal,” that was designed to prevent Musk’s DOGE from gaining unlawful access to the Treasury Department’s payment system.
As Republican lawmakers faced mounting blowback in their districts for failing to stand up to Musk’s DOGE, Democrats seized on the momentum and started holding more town halls, even in Republican districts. Musk was also a centerpiece of Democrats’ winning message strategy in the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
With Musk’s departure fast approaching, some Democrats have started pivoting away from specifically targeting Musk. Instead they have focused more on how DOGE’s decisions — like firing veterans and cutting potentially life-saving research grants — were inefficient attempts at making the government work better.
“We really tried to make Musk the enemy,” said Sydney Register, press secretary for the Progressive Change Institute, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s sister organization. “The ‘Musk stealing from you‘ message worked really well. But beyond that, we needed to reflect the very real havoc his fake efficiency work is wreaking on people’s daily lives. Despite his shrinking visibility, Musk is still a villain and his influence will continue.”
For many Democrats, Musk’s departure from an official government role is nothing more than a technicality.
“Elon isn’t going anywhere,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN. “He’s just trying to skirt, I think, the public disclosures that would be required if he specifically tried to maintain the very narrow role that he has right now.”
Some hope that Musk’s stepping back will slow DOGE’s momentum.
New York Rep. Pat Ryan, who has publicly campaigned against potential Social Security office closures, told CNN, “Hopefully with Musk gone we can fight back harder on that.”
Others said the key challenge will be shifting attention from Musk to the man who empowered him.
“I think the public understands exactly what Elon Musk was attempting to do on behalf of his boss, Donald Trump, and I think that they will understand that that work will continue,” California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the No. 3 House Democrat, told CNN, “whether Elon Musk is the puppet master behind it or not.”
CNN’s Rene Marsh, Marshall Cohen, Sunlen Serfaty, Tierney Sneed, Brian Todd, Hadas Gold and Ella Nilsen contributed to this report.
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