The Department of Government Efficiency says it is not dead yet.
A Reuters report asserting that DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore has been discredited by the controversial agency and criticized by the Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor, the primary source for the wire service’s article.
Elon Musk, who led DOGE as it recklessly fired thousands of federal workers whom the government later begged to return, launched attacks against Reuters, calling it “the worst” and claiming that it lies “relentlessly.”
Reuters lies relentlessly https://t.co/BpOq8PWTt5
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2025
The official DOGE account weighed in Monday night.
“As usual, this is fake news from @Reuters,” it wrote. “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Just last week, DOGE terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers $335M. We’ll be back in a few days with our regularly scheduled Friday update.”
Kupor, 54, said Reuters “spliced” his comments to “create a grabbing headline,” but he did not outright call the article false. He said DOGE has no centralized leadership and that its mission lives on via the Office of Personnel Management.
Reuters has not issued a correction or clarification for its story. The White House, which did not respond to questions seeking clarity on DOGE’s status, has not said whether the department still exists.
DOGE, which was chartered to operate into next summer, has operated in a grey area since it was established on day one of MAGA 2.0.
Created by executive order, DOGE skirted government norms and rules—like having Musk, the world’s richest man, lead the initiative despite being a special government employee that was not authorized to do so.
Infamously, DOGE hired right-wing Gen Zers who led a firing blitz that upended the lives of tens of thousands of Americans with little to show for it. The department faded into the background after Musk’s explosive exit from Washington in June.
As Reuters noted, Trump now refers to DOGE in the past tense. One of Musk’s teen goons, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, arguably the highest-profile member of DOGE outside of Musk, now works for the newly created “National Design Studio,” as does Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who was also initially an adviser at DOGE.
Despite this, DOGE’s account on X claims that it is still canceling contracts and cutting federal spending by billions each month. It is unclear who is making such cuts.
Unlike other government entities, DOGE’s figures cannot be taken at face value. In February, it logged a canceled contract, earmarked for ICE’s since-shuttered “Office of Diversity and Civil Rights,” as having saved $8 billion, despite the contract being worth $8 million—a whopping $7.992 billion less than the actual savings. DOGE has been plagued by similar billion-dollar mistakes since then.
DOGE’s blind slashing of government jobs required the government to rehire 26,511 people that it had let go, says Elaine Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution.
Kamarck told Ars Technica that it is evident that DOGE “cut muscle, not fat,” and that “they didn’t really know what they were doing.”
She added that the mass rehirings of workers were a “tacit admission that the blanket firings that took place during the DOGE era placed the federal government in danger of not being able to accomplish some of its most important missions.”
The post Zombie DOGE Back From Dead With Promise to Continue Reign of Terror appeared first on The Daily Beast.
