The Free Press
Elon Musk was back at SpaceX this week, planning to update the world about the company’s plans “to make life multiplanetary” right after launching the latest test flight of its Starship rocket. The update was canceled after the rocket spun out of control, but at least it didn’t explode after liftoff like SpaceX’s last two flights. Notwithstanding the two failed launches, Musk is back to doing what he does best.
But now that the world’s richest man has returned to a mission he had long before Donald Trump tapped him to lead DOGE, what will become of the bureaucracy-hunting, cost-cutting attack dog that Musk unleashed on the federal government?
Musk, who said this week he is back to “spending 24/7 at work” for X, xAI, Tesla, and SpaceX and “sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” might find more success in his quest to reach Mars than he did as the leader of DOGE. His exit followed a chaotic five months that spurred a conveyor belt of legal challenges and resistance from top Trump officials, as well as pushback from Republicans to what looked like DOGE’s inflated estimates of how much in federal spending it helped cut. DOGE’s website puts the total at $175 billion, but outside budget experts and some conservative critics have said the actual savings are much smaller due to DOGE overcounting grants and contracts awarded by the government.
“Musk made himself a total pariah,” Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist in Trump’s first White House, told The Free Press. “He had access, admiration, unlimited resources—and by his own actions toward people, blew it all.”
On Wednesday night, Musk thanked the president in a post on X and wrote that DOGE’s mission “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
While Musk is gone, he is leaving behind dozens of DOGE staffers that he helped install at federal agencies across the bureaucracy to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse that Musk said was rampant. They have backgrounds in software engineering, human resources, law, finance, and real estate. Many are young and had no prior government experience.
Most importantly, many of these staffers have begun to accumulate power and influence that they believe will help them keep the mission of DOGE alive. “DOGE as a construct has now gone from this specialized task force that shocked the system into something else, with most of the key policy people embedded at the agencies,” a senior DOGE official said.
While early on DOGE was mostly working across agencies as “landing teams,” it soon became clear that some of the people on Musk’s team should convert to political appointees to have broader authority, the DOGE official added. For example, lawyer Jeremy Lewin, who reported to Musk and was assigned to various agencies, now reports to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Lewin, 28, also is acting director of the agency’s Office of Foreign Assistance and is helping dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development as its acting deputy administrator for policy and programs.
Other DOGE staffers joined Musk’s team as unpaid volunteers. And some paid DOGE employees who reported to Musk are now embedded at agencies such as the General Services Administration, which oversees federal contracts; the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency; and the U.S. Digital Service, temporarily renamed by Trump as the U.S. DOGE Service, to work on software and IT modernization.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told The Free Press that DOGE’s mission to cut waste, fraud, and abuse “will surely continue” and that employees from DOGE “who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient.”
But perhaps the biggest challenge that DOGE faces is overcoming the chaos caused by its unconventional tactics that had strained its relationships with Trump administration officials. A painful “inflection point,” described one senior DOGE official, was when the directors of some federal agencies told their employees to ignore Musk’s directive in February to email what they did the last week at work—partly out of concerns that the emails could result in the accidental sharing of classified materials.
The resistance “was a moment of realignment,” the DOGE official said. “There was then kind of a shift in thinking where we were working in lockstep with the cabinet secretaries on everything—and there’s no going around that.”
However, the feuding never stopped, and it remains to be seen if the post-Musk DOGE can overcome Musk’s infighting with Trump’s inner circle. In March, Musk criticized Rubio in a tense meeting for supposedly failing to fire enough employees, and Musk accused Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of continuing to employ officials tied to President Joe Biden’s diversity, equity, and inclusion push. In April, Musk got into a shouting match in the West Wing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over who should lead the IRS. Musk reportedly called Bessent a “Soros agent” because he worked at an investment firm founded by Democratic megadonor George Soros.
Former DOGE official Sahil Lavingia wrote on his personal website Wednesday that Trump’s agency chiefs “were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.” As the public saw news report after news report detailing “mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless,” many assumed that “DOGE was directly responsible.”
Meanwhile, DOGE’s website is still riddled with omissions that make it nearly impossible for the public to track its work. The website also contains whopping errors. In other instances, there has been confusion about the cuts. DOGE said it saved $1.9 billion by cutting an IRS contract, but the company that was awarded the contract has said it was canceled during the Biden administration. A Trump administration official told The Free Press that the award was paused but not canceled under Biden because another bidder protested the award.
“We received the message on the website,” one DOGE official told The Free Press. DOGE is “trying to do a better job” of showcasing its work and is planning to revamp the website.
Musk also left behind a new fight that is now underway in Congress over codifying DOGE’s spending cuts. Since any spending cuts made by DOGE are for funding that was initially appropriated by Congress, members of the House and Senate need to vote to rescind them for those savings to be final.
“You may be able to cancel spending on a particular grant or contract or building, but you don’t actually realize the savings of doing so until you go to Congress and they agree to rescind the funds that they provided,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The rescissions process should almost be seen as like the scoreboard on how much savings DOGE actually lawfully achieves.”
Trump loyalists in Congress who have backed proposals to lock in the cuts have faced resistance from some Republican lawmakers, including about some of DOGE’s reductions in foreign aid. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that he is “eager” to approve cuts and will aim to do so through the budget appropriations process, or after the White House sends a “rescissions package” recommending specific cuts.
Next week, the White House will reportedly send a proposal to Capitol Hill to target foreign-aid funding as well as NPR and PBS, the public broadcasting companies that Trump has defunded through executive orders that accused them of left-leaning bias.
Now on the sidelines, Musk has lamented the failure of Republicans to codify DOGE’s cost-cutting so far. “Yeah (sigh),” he replied to a user on X who criticized the GOP.
The billionaire seems only more and more disappointed with Republicans. In an interview with CBS this week, Musk said the domestic-policy bill passed in the House last week “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” The tax provisions in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion by 2034, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk said about the bill, which is the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda, “but I don’t know if it can be both.”
That opinion puts Musk at odds with Trump, who has urged the Senate to pass the legislation so that the president can sign it into law. But Trump seems to care less these days about what Musk has to say—and has stopped posting about him online.
Once the main character of DOGE—and perhaps the entire Trump administration—Musk has even expressed second thoughts about all the time he dedicated to helping Trump. “I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Musk said Tuesday. “It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks."
To conservative critics, it was time for DOGE’s head honcho to hang it up anyway. “The thing was totally performative,” Bannon said.
For more on what went wrong at DOGE, read Joe Nocera:
