Elon Musk’s beloved DOGE has closed. But its legacy is deadly

The first ten months of the second Donald Trump administration feels like ten years, and nothing brings that home more than the recent exclusive from Reuters that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — also known as Elon Musk’s pet project — has ended its reign of terror eight months earlier than mandated. 

The era of Elon feels like a bygone time, back when Trump’s return to the White House still felt surreal, as if we were all trying to run through water, stunned that the country actually voted for him again after all he’d done. To make matters worse, he seemed to be even worse than he was during his first term, his bromance with the world’s richest man offering the most vivid evidence that we were already halfway down the rabbit hole and it was only going to get weirder. 

Musk was everywhere, glued to Trump’s side like a giant leech, practically running the transition from Mar-a-Lago, where he took a bungalow so he could be there to advise Trump around the clock. But his personal baby was DOGE, and the president was so dazzled by his vast fortune that he quickly gave Musk the mandate and the power to raze federal programs by any means he felt necessary. Having recently bought Twitter and immediately cut personnel to the bone, Musk felt he had more than enough experience and knowledge to do the same with the federal government.

DOGE ended up being a collection of young nerds Musk imported from his other companies, led by a couple of trusted aides, and the first thing they did was dig into data the government collects on companies and individuals. (Why that access was so vital has never been fully explained. But some suspect it was to be used for Grok, Musk’s artificial intelligence project.) DOGE started slashing programs that Musk personally deemed to be wasteful, like medical research. Contracts were cancelled willy-nilly; businesses were shuttered. Foreign aid was of particular interest to Musk, who is originally from South Africa, so he immediately targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and programs that were keeping people alive around the world. They were abruptly halted. A study published in the Lancet projects that the cuts could result in 14 million deaths by 2030, of which four million will be children. DOGE has quite a legacy. 

Musk famously appeared at a conservative gathering wielding a chainsaw and proclaiming, “this is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” The federal workforce was devastated. As of Nov. 18, data collected by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service indicates that over 211,000 civil servants have left the workforce, most of that a result of the DOGE purge. 

From a financial perspective, DOGE’s value for the American taxpayer has been negligible. A POLITICO analysis from August showed that DOGE had saved less than 5% of its claimed savings. No wonder they are closing up shop and sneaking out of town. 

The story of the department’s dissolution is a testament to how dysfunctional it was — and how Musk’s supposed business genius is clearly overrated. POLITICO’s Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippman wrote about the succession drama that took place when Trump and Musk had their dramatic, public falling out last spring. With Musk gone, the young DOGE employees — including one who infamously went by Big Balls — were left adrift, unsure if they were going to be ousted as well.

Rival factions formed within the group, with battles for control culminating in the bizarre spectacle of DOGE’s top operational lead being fired and refusing to leave. People throughout the administration worked behind the scenes to uproot various DOGE employees until they finally brought in a veteran hand to run the General Services Administration, where DOGE had been burrowed, and he finally got control of the situation. 

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Now, with DOGE officially disbanded, there are a few remnants dispersed across the government, such as the National Design Studio, which has been assigned to make the government websites more attractive. A few people have been reassigned to jobs at the same agencies they had been tasked with cutting. But it’s over. 

Musk had no idea what he was doing. Like so many wealthy men — including Donald Trump and most of his Cabinet — he was convinced that because he had been successful at running a company and making money, he was a genius who could do anything. And like so many who erroneously believe that government should be run like a business, Musk failed to understand that it is a completely different animal, requiring political skills, coalition building and finding consensus. His strategy of tearing everything up and fixing it later simply doesn’t work in government (and frankly, it’s unlikely it works very well in business either).

But Musk did manage to make the real slash-and-burn artist, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, look like a strategic genius by comparison. It could even be said that Musk paved the way for the much more systematic and ruthless government cutting under Vought without all the drama.

Months after their dramatic feud came to a climax, there now seems to be something of a rapprochement between Musk and Trump. They sat together for an awkward few moments at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September, and last week Musk attended the state dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Musk even managed to get his chosen NASA administrator renominated for the post by Trump, who had withdrawn it because he’d given money to Democrats. On the other hand, Trump took a rude swipe at him at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, saying “You’re lucky I’m with you, Elon,” and wondering if he’d ever thanked him. 

Like most people who spend too much time on X, Musk has become more radical than ever. His AI experiments get more bizarre by the day, and his SpaceX projects, which include driverless cybercabs, have been repeatedly delayed. Tesla shareholders just agreed to pay him a trillion dollars, but considering the stock price maybe they should have taken a page from DOGE and cut their losses like Trump did.