The Department of Government Efficiency is no more — and it barely made a dent in its original mission to slash federal spending.
On Sunday, Reuters reported DOGE has disbanded and no longer operates as a single group within the federal government. Scott Kupar, who heads the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, later said DOGE’s goals remain embedded within federal agencies.
“The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS,” Kupar wrote in a Sunday social media post. “But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen.”
Once a vaunted force in the Trump administration, the group gradually lost influence beginning in June, when its architect Elon Musk traded insults and criticism with President Donald Trump in spectacular public fashion. The two men have since taken baby steps to mend their ties. DOGE, though, never regained the free rein it previously had to issue layoff notices, terminating government contracts, and shuttering agencies.
Ten months after DOGE was first established, the group serves as an example of the Trump administration falling well short in its pursuit to shrink government spending due to legal and political setbacks.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk set up and helmed DOGE through the first half of the year, touting it as the vanguard of eliminating waste and saving taxpayer money. Having hired dozens of staffers for DOGE, the Tesla CEO was equipped with a green-light from the Trump administration and embarked on a cost-cutting rampage through the federal government.
The actual result was paltry: DOGE claims around $214 billion in savings, but experts have disputed the figures and say they are overstated and riddled with inaccuracies, such as double-counting. There’s still no clear image on the scale of the spending cuts.
Jessica Riedl, an incoming policy expert at the Brookings Institution, described the entire organization in a social media post as “spending cut theatre” that had “a total misunderstanding of the lead deficit drivers.” She was referring to entitlement programs that provide retirement and healthcare benefits to seniors: Social Security and Medicare.
Annual spending at the discretion of Congress totaled around 26% of the federal budget last year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was,” Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, said in a social media post. He observed that overall government spending was projected to be higher in the 2025 fiscal year compared to last year.
Kupar told The New York Times in August that the federal government was shedding around 300,000 federal employees this year, or one in eight of all civilian government employees. He attributed most of that to buyouts and a deferred resignation program that DOGE set in motion. Some employees, though, have since been reinstated back into the federal workforce.
Though DOGE failed in its original goals, Musk hasn’t fully withdrawn from U.S. politics. Musk, a trillionaire in the making thanks to his recently approved pay package, attended a dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin-Salman at the White House last week, along with the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum.
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