Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, leading periodically to claims—most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management—that the group doesn’t exist, or has vanished altogether.
But DOGE isn’t dead. Many of its original members are in full-time roles at various government agencies, and the new National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, a close ally of Musk’s.
Even if DOGE doesn’t survive another year, or until the US semiquincentennial—its original expiration date, per the executive order establishing it—the organization’s larger project will continue. DOGE from its inception was used for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the wholesale consolidation of data in service of concentrating power in the executive branch. It is a pattern that experts say could spill over beyond the Trump administration.
“I do think it has altered the norms about where legislative power ends and where executive power begins simply by ignoring those norms,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “This is not necessarily going to be limited to Republican administrations. There are going to be future Democratic presidents who will say, ‘Well, DOGE was able to do this, why can’t we?’”
The earliest days of DOGE were characterized by a chaotic blitz in which small teams of DOGE operatives, like the now infamous Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, were deployed across government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing workers, and cutting contracts. And while these moves were often radical, if not appearing to be illegal, as matters of bureaucratic operation, they were in service of what had been the Trump administration’s agenda all along.
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Goals like cutting discretionary spending and drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce had already been championed by people like vice president JD Vance, who in 2021 called for the “de-Ba’athification” of the government, and Russell Vought, now the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These goals were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought wasn’t the end, but the means—its unique insight was that controlling technical infrastructure, something achievable with a small group, functionally amounted to controlling the government.
“There has never been a unit of government that was handed so much power to fundamentally upend government agencies with so little oversight,” says Moynihan.
Under the Constitution, the authority for establishing and funding federal agencies comes from Congress. But Trump and many of the people who support him, including Vought and Vance, adhere to what was until relatively recently a fringe view of how government should be run: the unitary executive theory. This posits that, much like the CEO of a company, the president has near complete control over the executive branch, of which federal agencies are a part—power more like that of a king than of the figure described in the nation’s founding documents.
“The unitary executive theory has animated a lot of what DOGE has done at a lot of different places,” says George Foote, outside general counsel to the US Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent nonprofit funded by Congress. Though USIP is an independent organization, the Trump administration asserted that USIP was part of the executive branch and, therefore, should be brought under control by DOGE. “DOGE was certainly a tool that the people in the White House and OMB used to impose that sort of control,” Foote adds.
With efficiency and innovation as justifications—and with access to all unclassified systems in the executive branch, per the terms of the executive order establishing it—DOGE was able to spread across the government, quickly executing some of the main priorities of the administration.
“I’ll say they wanted to bring artificial intelligence and advanced computer capabilities. And there’s plenty of room for that in government,” says Foote. “But at USIP and at some of the places, that was just covering up. It was pure pretense. They smashed things up.”
“President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government, and the Administration is committed to delivering on this pledge for the American people,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle in response to a request for comment.
DOGE focused its efforts on gaining access to sensitive systems, like the payments mechanism at a Treasury agency, normally manned by apolitical federal employees, as a way to execute the administration’s political agenda. WIRED first reported in February that DOGE operative Marko Elez gained access to Treasury systems within the first two weeks of the Trump administration. At the same time, DOGE operatives were being granted access to other federal payroll systems.
In March, WIRED reported that accessing the Treasury’s payment systems was part of DOGE and the administration’s preliminary plan to cut off funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Instead of going to Congress—the entity legally allowed to create and shutter an agency—DOGE could act now, no questions asked or approval needed.
With access to servers allowing them to send out government-wide emails, DOGE operatives sent out blasts demanding to know what federal workers were doing, and asking them to resign en masse. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, then-DOGE operative Sahil Lavingia built an AI tool to “munch” contracts and assess which ones to cut.
“They were cutting out contracts and firing people. Full stop,” says Foote.
At the Social Security Agency (SSA), a DOGE team attempted to add immigrants who were still alive to what’s known as the “master death file” in order to essentially shut off their social security numbers.
“You just go to the data systems, you go to payroll systems, you figure out where the contracts are going out the door and you take control of those. From there, you can just make sure people don’t get paid, or you can eliminate a contract, or you could pull together different data sources,” says Moynihan. “That’s a different mode of operating from how even people like Russ Vought or Stephen Miller, people who are fairly sophisticated in thinking about bureaucracy, were operating in the past.”
The DOGE teams also began the process of knitting together disparate datasets housed across agencies in a way that had never been done before, as authorized by another executive order. In April, WIRED reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was building a master database with data from the SSA, at least two state voter rolls, and the Internal Revenue Services (IRS). Shortly after, DHS announced that DOGE had helped with its creation—all without the legally required documentation to do so.
According to a whistleblower disclosure filed by former SSA chief data officer Chuck Borges, DOGE operatives copied the sensitive Numerical Identification System (NUMIDENT) database, which contains records of social security claims as well as personal data on all Americans, storing it in a cloud environment “that apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”
“I absolutely think the data consolidation piece or prioritization of this administration is tied to DOGE and will be part of DOGE’s legacy,” says Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW is helping represent several plaintiffs, including naturalized citizens, who are suing the government, claiming it is unlawfully sharing sensitive information across agencies. “Just running roughshod over legal requirements and violating the law is not how you run things in a constitutional democracy.”
When Musk left government in May, DOGE’s operations appeared to have ramped down. There were no more sudden entrances into buildings or overnight demands for access to sensitive data. But the work started by DOGE continued.
On the administrative side, contracts are still being cut, and Vought continues to try—sometimes unsuccessfully—to fire more and more federal employees. The DHS database to track immigrants has only been formalized and expanded. There is no indication that the copied NUMIDENT database has been removed or restricted. Though a judge ruled that the rapid dismantling of USAID “likely violated the United States Constitution,” the agency remains in limbo, neither fully operational nor killed off entirely. (Major cuts to USAID were, in fact, part of Project 2025’s plan for the agency.)
Similarly, despite a federal judge’s ruling that DOGE’s takeover of USIP was “unlawful,” the organization’s building was renamed after President Trump, and the majority of its staff remains barred from accessing it. “What happened at USIP is a transition from the DOGE ‘wrecking team’ to more of an institutionalized part of the government, part of the State Department, part of the White House foreign policy operation,” says Foote. “It’s completely contrary to the USIP Act and completely out of bounds with everything the USIP has done.”
Moynihan says that DOGE’s actions will likely permanently change the US government. “There will be a whole bunch of additional ramifications in specific policy areas that flow from just the massive loss of capacity,” he says. “I think somewhere around 200,000 employees will be gone from the federal government.” The loss of USAID, some researchers have estimated, has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.
For his part, Sus says he believes that there are paths to undoing the damage that DOGE has wrought. “While we think that this is fixable, it will require a significant amount of work,” says Sus. “And it will require a significant amount of diligence by executive branch officials going forward and from the courts.”
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