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department of government efficiency
DOGE 'Doesn't Exist' Anymore, But the Damage It Did 'Will Be Felt for a Long Time'
"The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths," one expert said.
Nov 23, 2025
The Department of Government Efficiency—Elon Musk's much-heralded attempt to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy—has quietly disbanded eight months before its official expiration date, Reuters reported on Sunday.
The news agency received confirmation of DOGE's demise from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor earlier this month.
"That doesn't exist," Kupor told Reuters, adding that it was "no longer a centralized agency."
Kupor also said that a government hiring freeze implemented by DOGE had ended.
" DOGE is fading away like bank robbery gangs fade away after the robberies are done."
When President Donald Trump first signed the executive order creating DOGE, he said that it would last until July 4, 2026. However, following a public feud with Musk in late spring, Trump and his team had indicated the department was no longer active, often speaking of DOGE in the past tense.
Musk originally set out to save $1 trillion in federal expenditures by cutting what he claimed to be waste. According to the DOGE website, the department has only saved $214 billion of that aim. However, even that number is in dispute, with one Senate report finding the agency wasted over $21 billion.
At the same time, DOGE sowed chaos in the federal government by mass firing workers, hobbling consumer watchdog agencies, and gutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—a move that could lead to more than 14 million deaths worldwide by 2030. At the same time, DOGE employees' attempts to gain access to sensitive government data have made the data of millions of Americans less secure. One whistleblower report said the department uploaded Social Security data to a cloud server at risk from hacking.
Several experts reacted to Reuters' report by reflecting on DOGE's destructive legacy.
"Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was," Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, wrote on social media. "Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024—but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.* The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths."
Rachel Khan wrote for the New Republic:
DOGE’s legacy is both very stupid and very sad: It decimated the federal workforce, including Social Security personnel at local offices, and made it easier for hackers to access your data. The agency tore apart USAID, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally. And all this for projected savings—numbers which grew smaller and less ambitious every time Musk mentioned them.
While DOGE may fade away into a fever dream of Trump’s first 100 days, its effects—and the suffering it inflicted—will be felt for a long time.
Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, joked, "DOGE seems to be out of business, I guess Elon put our $5k dividend checks in the mail," referring to a promise Musk had made to redistribute DOGE's savings to taxpayers.
However, other commenters argued that DOGE had not failed, but had rather succeeded at its unstated aims.
Georgia State University political scientist Jeff Lazarus wrote that Musk "donated $277 million to Trump so he could steal the federal government’s data, dismantle the nation’s infrastructure, and stop foreign aid from going to nonwhite people. It’s a quid pro quo breathtaking in scope, corruption, and damage, & completely unprecedented in American history."
Bluesky user En Buen Ora wrote: "DOGE did not fail in any way to accomplish its goals. Its goals were never efficiency or saving money. Its goals were to destroy as much of government as possible forever, and to steal data for the Space Nazi. DOGE is fading away like bank robbery gangs fade away after the robberies are done."
While DOGE as an entity may not longer be working, Reuters noted that several of its employees had moved on to other government positions:
- Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia now runs the Trump-created National Design Studio;
- former Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason is an adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS);
- DOGE team member Zachary Terrell is chief technology officer at HHS;
- Rachel Riley is chief of the Office of Naval Research; and
- Jeremy Lewin, who helped gut USAID, works for the State Department overseeing foreign assistance.
ProPublica has compiled a running list of every DOGE staffer it could verify, which now totals 114.
Author Tyler King wrote on social media that “‘DOGE doesn’t exist anymore' is a misleading premise because more than 100 former DOGErs have become deeply embedded in federal agencies to generally fuck around with our data and arbitrarily disrupt budgets."
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Trump's Data Deletions Will Make It Harder to See How His Policies Harm Children
Without this data, the impacts of manifest Trump administration policies on vulnerable children are hidden from view.
Nov 19, 2025
On Thursday, the federal government is expected to release jobs data that was not available during the 44 days of the shutdown. As an advocate and expert on the economic security of women and families, I’m happy this data will be updated. But I’ve been thinking about other important federal data that the Trump administration eliminated, related to children’s health and well-being, which doesn’t seem likely to be reinstated.
For example, the US Department of Agriculture announced in September that it will be discontinuing the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS) and the accompanying Household Food Security report. The annual Household Food Security report shows how many children and families across the country are struggling to obtain enough healthy food. We know that Black and brown children are at disproportionate risk of poverty and food hardship, and actions by the Trump administration—including cuts to food aid intended for food banks earlier in the spring, the refusal to pay full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits during the shutdown, and the historic cuts to SNAP made by the budget reconciliation bill in July ($287 billion over the next 10 years)—can only be expected to make it worse. But we will no longer have the data to confirm those expected increases in food insecurity.
Here’s another example: The Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitors pregnancy risk, and maintains a dataset that shows disparities in maternal and infant health. Unfortunately, earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency cuts slashed the staff in the office responsible for that data. (What’s more, there is now a banner on the web page that states in part, “This page does not reflect reality and therefore the [Trump] Administration and [the US Department of Health and Human Services] reject it,” which kind of undermines confidence.) Instead of addressing the crisis of Black women’s maternal health, we are erasing evidence of it. This is likewise problematic since the budget bill also made trillion-dollar cuts to healthcare.
And critical data besides the Department of Labor’s Employment Situation Summary, such as the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, was suspended during the shutdown—making it harder for us to know how Black and brown children are doing. (The Census Bureau’s website, incidentally, says this data will be released “as soon as possible.”)
By getting rid of federal data about Black and brown children, women, and families, this administration is making it impossible to see the harm they are wreaking—harm to a generation, harm that will have lifelong effects.
The lack of this data makes it harder and harder for us to see how some kids, especially kids of color, are doing—whether they are hungry, whether they are healthy, much less if they are in trouble. Without this data, moreover, the impacts of these and manifest other Trump administration policies on vulnerable children are hidden from view.
To be sure, this data is only part of the Trump administration’s efforts to make Black and brown children—and their parents—invisible. The federal government has used President Donald Trump’s “anti-DEI” executive order to eviscerate programs like Head Start and rewrite history. The pictures of workers on the Department of Labor’s website are now all white men. Immigrant children and families are literally disappearing from their homes, from their jobs, and from their schools into detention centers. Why should we pay attention when the data showing ongoing racial disparities in hunger or health outcomes disappears—or fight to reinstate it?
By getting rid of federal data about Black and brown children, women, and families, this administration is making it impossible to see the harm they are wreaking—harm to a generation, harm that will have lifelong effects. All of us, parents, families, and communities, need that data back because we can’t help heal that harm, until we know where our kids hurt.
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'No CEO Is Worth a Trillion-Dollar Pay Package': Unions Target Outrageous Elon Musk Tesla Deal
The world's richest man "has wiped billions off of Tesla's share value, trashed the company's reputation, and driven millions of its customers away," one campaigner said, urging shareholders to reject his pay plan.
Oct 22, 2025
A coalition of labor unions and progressive advocacy organizations on Tuesday launched the "Take Back Tesla" campaign, urging shareholders of the electric vehicle giant to reject a pay package that could make CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.
Musk is already the richest person on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $458-485.9 billion as of Wednesday. His previous 10-year proposal, worth $56 billion, was invalidated by a judge. He's now on an interim plan that has not been approved by shareholders, who are set to vote on the $1 trillion package at the company's annual meeting next month.
Tesla's board unveiled the proposed $1 trillion plan—which would be the biggest corporate compensation package in history—last month. Musk would get the full amount if he boosted share value "eightfold over the next decade" and stayed at Tesla for at least that long. He would own 29% of the company, one of several in which he holds a leadership position.
Top unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Communications Workers of America (CWA), joined groups including Americans for Financial Reform, Ekō, People's Action Institute, Public Citizen, and Stop the Money Pipeline for the new campaign against "Musk's money grab." As part of it, they launched the website TakeBackTesla.com.
"How shareholders vote on Musk's trillion-dollar pay package and other important Tesla ballot items will likely set the stage for similar attempts by other oligarchs to consolidate their own power."
Several coalition leaders pointed to Musk's recent efforts to get President Donald Trump elected and then help the Republican gut the federal government—which has been shut down for 22 days due to a congressional funding fight—via their so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The billionaire's DOGE activities provoked nationwide protests targeting Tesla.
"In the last 12 months, Elon Musk's attempts to destroy the American government have caused huge damage to the Tesla brand and contributed to a significant decline in the company's sales in multiple key markets," Stop the Money Pipeline's Alex Connon noted, urging shareholders to "reject this insane proposal."
AFT president Randi Weingarten said that "the Tesla board, instead of upholding basic governance standards, wants to green-light an outrageous $1 trillion pay package for a CEO who has spent most of the year engaged in childish political brawls, rather than working to create shareholder value."
"To reward this destructive behavior with an obscene salary is a slap in the face—not only to the federal workers he's fired, but to the retirees whose pensions are invested in Tesla stock," she declared.
Dubbing the proposal "Musk's corporate heist," CWA president Claude Cummings Jr. similarly stressed that "Elon Musk is enriching himself by stealing from the American worker—from our infrastructure dollars for rural broadband to workers' private data from the Department of Labor—and now he wants to steal $1 trillion from our pensions and retirement accounts."
Natalia Renta, Americans for Financial Reform's associate director of corporate governance and power, emphasized that the vote is bigger than Musk. She said that "how shareholders vote on Musk's trillion-dollar pay package and other important Tesla ballot items will likely set the stage for similar attempts by other oligarchs to consolidate their own power."
"This new website allows people to get their voices heard by sending letters to their state financial officer and mutual fund manager (if they have one)," Renta added. State treasurers of Connecticut, Nevada, and New Mexico have already joined mounting calls for shareholders to vote down Musk's compensation package.
Ekō executive director Emma Ruby-Sachs argued that "no CEO is worth a trillion-dollar pay package, but especially not Elon Musk, who has wiped billions off of Tesla's share value, trashed the company's reputation, and driven millions of its customers away. Tesla's shareholders need to show the judgment Musk so clearly lacks, and reject this pay deal."
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