Has Elon Musk's DOGE Project Lost Its Way?

A few weeks after the presidential election, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made a bold promise: They would team up to slash bureaucracy and cut trillions of dollars in federal spending.

A few weeks after the presidential election, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made a bold promise: They would team up to slash bureaucracy and cut trillions of dollars in federal spending.

Through the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the pair promised to tackle "the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end," the pair promised in a joint op-ed printed in The Wall Street Journal.

"We are entrepreneurs, not politicians," they claimed. "We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."

More than two weeks into the second Trump administration, the situation has evolved considerably. Most obviously, Ramaswamy is no longer attached to the DOGE project, leaving Musk as the sole leader. Rather than being a volunteer working from outside the government, Musk now has an office in the White House, where the newly minted DOGE reports directly to Trump. And while the DOGE does seem to be aggressively targeting wasteful spending in the executive branch, it remains quite unclear whether those efforts will survive inevitable court challenges and whether the federal budget will actually decline (or at least grow less quickly) as a result. 

The main problem in assessing the DOGE project at this point is that so much is unknown—and that much of that opacity seems to be intentional. Even the most basic things like the legal limits of Musk's role and how many staff are working for the DOGE remain unclear. More complicated questions like how much wasteful spending has been cut and whether those cuts can survive legal and congressional challenges are completely unknown. Indeed, even the most foundational aspect of what DOGE is doing—using presidential authority to block spending Congress has authorized—is on shaky legal footing. Musk is obviously moving quickly and causing a great deal of alarm within the administrative state, but it is hard to tell whether he's slashing government, breaking things, or merely putting on a big show for Trump's fans in the media and online.

Here's what we do know: The DOGE's mandate has already shifted significantly—to the point where it looks more like a more aggressive version of a Barack Obama–era project meant to streamline and digitize bureaucracy rather than the budget-cutting entity originally promised. 

That might be a worthwhile goal, of course, and one that could give the president more direct control over the federal government's extensive contracting systems. But it is a considerably different one than the bold promise Musk made during the final stages of the presidential campaign: that DOGE would find $2 trillion in budget cuts. 

Ramaswamy said last week that his departure from the DOGE was due to a difference in vision. Whereas he wanted to focus on cutting federal regulations and working with Congress to cut spending, as he and Musk noted in their Journal op-ed, he said the department has now "evolved from a focus on legal constitutional issues" to a focus on digital technology.

Has the DOGE already lost its way? Or has Musk shaped it into a scalpel that will ultimately prove more effective? Could it be both?

From Meme to the White House

Unofficially, the DOGE was born on August 19, when Musk tweeted an AI-generated image of his likeness standing behind a podium labeled "Department of Government Efficiency." "I am willing to serve," he wrote in the post, an apparent nod to some off-the-cuff remarks made by Trump a few days earlier. 

Officially, however, new government agencies cannot simply spring from the foreheads of their fathers. After Trump won the election, and it became clear he was serious about appointing Musk (and Ramaswamy) to lead an IRL version of what had started as a campaign trail meme, there was widespread speculation about exactly what form the new entity would take.

On January 20, the country got the answer. Amid a flurry of Inauguration Day executive orders, Trump signed an order establishing the DOGE and gave it a mandate to "implement the President's DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity." To achieve those goals, the DOGE was empowered to place teams of people within other federal agencies and departments to "improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems."

As a practical matter, the DOGE took over the White House resources previously directed to the U.S. Digital Service, an entity created by the Obama administration with the goal of digitizing and modernizing governmental operations.

That executive order "resulted in a significant narrowing of the DOGE's mission, away from sweeping regulatory and budget cuts, toward a much narrower focus on tech modernization," James Broughel, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. (While some of Broughel's colleagues have had direct meetings