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revolving door project
Democracy Watchdog Exposes 'Heartbreaking Catalog of DOGE's Depredations'
"Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s attacks on the federal government will have long-standing effects on the American public," said the group's research director.
Jan 20, 2026
Exactly a year after President Donald Trump returned to office and swiftly signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency, the Revolving Door Project on Tuesday released a report detailing all the damage that DOGE has done.
"Under the banner of the so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE), Elon Musk and Russell Vought have eagerly shred political, professional, and legal precedent in their effort to dismantle the essential functions of the federal government—and most importantly, democracy at large," says the report, DOGE: From Meme to Government Erosion Machine.
In addition to being the richest person on Earth, Musk was DOGE's de facto leader until he left the administration at the end of May, on bad terms with Trump—a falling out addressed in the report. Meanwhile, Project 2025 architect Vought remains both director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
CFPB is among the 20 "agencies targeted by DOGE" that have their own sections in the report. Each section features a timeline of attacks, outlines impacts on capacity and material harms, and lists notable names of ousted leadership and DOGE agents.
"We hope that this report will show the public how dangerous a madman Elon Musk is, and why corrupt billionaires, with zero experience in governance, have no place making decisions for career officials."
"After Musk's exit, DOGE, filled with his lackeys, remained a feature in the federal government," the report states. "In fact, the guiding principles of DOGE—traumatizing federal workers, decimating government capacity, and slashing funding for people and places in need—were rejuvenated, albeit with a new, more effective and more discreet standard bearer."
Vought, the publication explains, "began firming up DOGE's legacy behind the scenes, using the power of his office to embed DOGE personnel in federal agencies as full time staff and institutionalize funding cuts through illegal use of the Impoundment Control Act."
Elon Musk may have left government, but DOGE's guiding principles still remain under the guidance of OMB Director Russel Vought. If anything, Vought will carry out the decimation of government capacity with an efficiency and ideological ruthlessness that Musk never possessed.
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— Revolving Door Project (@revolvingdoordc.bsky.social) January 20, 2026 at 11:23 AM
As OMB director, "Vought can review and reshape federal budget proposals according to his own ideological priorities, even if the agency leaders disagree," the document notes. "A supposed hyper-originalist and self-described Christian nationalist, Vought has used this leverage to reshape the federal government from the top down."
"The CFPB was a prime example of Vought’s vision of dismantling federal agencies that do not serve his interest," the report highlights, pointing to attack on personnel, agency funding, abandonment of key cases, and related legal battles. "The CFPB saga serves as a template of things to come with Vought at the helm of the DOGE mission."
Other targeted federal agencies include the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, General Services Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Office of Personnel Management, United States Agency for International Development, US Institute of Peace, and US Postal Service.
As the report lays out, DOGE has also gone after the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.
Our report breaks down DOGE’s activity at individual agencies in narrative order with timelines of the incursions, DOGE’s impact on workforce capacity, the material harms that DOGE’s cuts generated, and the names of ousted agency leadership.
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— Revolving Door Project (@revolvingdoordc.bsky.social) January 20, 2026 at 11:23 AM
"DOGE agents—a cohort of unelected, unqualified, and unaccountable goons recruited from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's orbit—have been given unfettered access to the internal machinery of federal agencies," the report says, naming another Big Tech billionaire. "From seizing control of the nation's payment system at the Treasury Department to orchestrating mass purges of the experts who ensure our food is safe, these actors bypassed traditional oversight to strip agencies of their ability to serve the American public."
Revolving Door Project deputy research director Christopher Lewis warned in a Tuesday statement that "Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s attacks on the federal government will have long-standing effects on the American public. From the cuts to the National Weather Service to the axing of fraud agents at the Federal Student Aid Office, every single American has and will continue to feel the effects of this administration's illegal and corrupt actions."
"We hope that this report will show the public how dangerous a madman Elon Musk is, and why corrupt billionaires, with zero experience in governance, have no place making decisions for career officials," he continued. "Our feckless Congress, especially Trump's enablers on the Hill, should be ashamed of themselves and what they have wrought."
"Our feckless Congress, especially Trump's enablers on the Hill, should be ashamed of themselves and what they have wrought."
Various recent analyses have exposed how US billionaires have benefited from Trump's second term and the Republican-controlled Congress while working-class Americans face an intensifying affordability crisis, struggling to afford everything from rent and groceries to soaring health insurance premiums.
"If anyone needed evidence that getting rich doesn't require brains or judgment, or that the private sector's supposed superiority over public servants was a myth, this heartbreaking catalog of DOGE's depredations should more than suffice," said Revolving Door Project executive director Jeff Hauser.
"The main lesson to be learned from Musk and DOGE," he added, "is that the next administration should pay careful attention to what DOGE did and proceed to do the exact opposite."
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‘Feckless’ Ken Martin Rebuked Over DNC Decision to Bury Autopsy of 2024 Election Disaster
"You can’t run as the party of democracy and transparency and then stick your own election autopsy in a drawer," said one critic.
Dec 18, 2025
The Democratic National Committee on Thursday drew strong criticism when it was revealed that the party's autopsy of its failures in the 2024 presidential election would not be publicly released.
According to the New York Times, DNC Chairman Ken Martin has decided against releasing the report because he "believes that looking back so publicly and painfully at the past would prove counterproductive for the party as it tries next year to take back power in Congress."
The decision to keep a lid on the report, however, is already sparking a backlash.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent argued in a Thursday piece that the decision by the DNC to bury the report "should unleash harsh criticism and recriminations" because it "could end up protecting key actors inside the party from accountability over the blown but winnable contest."
Sargent then pointed the finger at Future Forward, a super PAC that he said has earned a reputation for blowing large sums of money on ineffective television ads.
"Well before Election Day, the PAC came under harsh criticism from some Democrats who argued that it hadn’t spent sufficient money earlier in the campaign on ads attacking Trump," Sargent wrote. "Other Democrats charged that Future Forward’s ad-testing model and addiction to traditional TV ads led to anodyne communications and that its flawed theory of politics caused it to refrain from sufficiently targeting Trump, letting him avoid blame for his first-term disasters on Covid-19 and the economy."
Jeff Hauser, founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told Common Dreams that Martin's decision to bury the report was part of a broader pattern of a lack of accountability for US elites, an issue that he said is becoming more important" as America gets less and less equal."
"Ken Martin seems determined to become the Merrick Garland of DNC Chairs," added Hauser, "a feckless amiable sort unwilling to take on the powerful people who scream out for stringent accountability. Democrats ought to re-center their entire party around holding elites, be they from Big Tech, the Democratic Party establishment, Big Oil, or Trump's kleptocratic regime, accountable."
Rotimi Adeoye, a columnist for MS Now and former communications strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union, also accused party insiders of trying to protect elites at the expense of rebuilding public trust with voters.
"This is also happening as Congressional Dems sit at a -55 net approval," he argued on X. "If your numbers are that bad and your response is to bury the autopsy, you’re basically telling voters the insiders get protection while the base gets lectures."
Adeoye added that "you can’t run as the party of democracy and transparency and then stick your own election autopsy in a drawer," and said that "if the DNC thinks the report would 'hurt the party,' that means the problems are real and political, not analytical—and that’s exactly why people want to read it."
Journalist Yashar Ali, meanwhile, sent out a message on Bluesky encouraging DNC staffers who have access to the report to let him publish it.
"If you have access to this DNC report, please send it to me," he wrote. "I will protect your anonymity."
While the DNC isn't releasing its own report documenting party failures in 2024, the progressive advocacy group RootsAction last week published an autopsy written by journalist Christopher D. Cook, who argued that former Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign made a major mistake by trying to court so-called moderate Republican voters and corporate donors instead of focusing on the struggles of working-class Americans.
"This was a preventable disaster," Cook said, "but Harris and the Democratic Party leadership prioritized the agendas of corporate donors and gambled on a centrist path, while largely abandoning working-class, young, and progressive voters."
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Institutions Urged to Cut Ties With Larry Summers After Latest Epstein Revelations
"These latest revelations ought to be the final straw," said a Summers critic.
Nov 13, 2025
Economist Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard University and top economic policy official under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, is facing increased scrutiny after emails released this week showed he maintained a friendly relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein even after he served a term in prison for soliciting a minor.
The emails, which were released by investigators in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, revealed that Summers regularly conversed with Epstein on a wide range of topics, years after Epstein victims had filed lawsuits against him and his associates that contained lurid details about his alleged underage sex-trafficking ring.
In one email, flagged by writer Jon Schwarz, the then-64-year-old Summers asked Epstein for advice about a woman he appeared to be pursuing, while complaining about her relegating him to being a "friend without benefits." The email was sent in March of 2019, just months before Epstein would be indicted on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.
Another email, flagged by historian Sam Hasselby, showed Summers' wife, Harvard English professor Elisa New, recommending that Epstein read the book Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is about a middle-aged professor professor who kidnaps and sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl. New described the book to Epstein as the story of "a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl."
In a statement given to the Harvard Crimson, Summers called his relationship with Epstein one of the "great regrets in my life," and "a major error of judgement."
This acknowledgement was not enough to satisfy the government watchdog group Revolving Door Project, which on Thursday said Summers should lose his positions at Harvard, where he is currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and at the OpenAI Foundation, where he currently sits as a member of its board of directors.
Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser said that the emails showed "a close personal bond between the two men, long after Epstein’s conviction for sex crimes against minors" and added that "it is well past time for the powerful institutions that work closely with Summers—including OpenAI—to distance themselves from him, and anyone with a close relationship to Epstein."
Hauser also emphasized that Summers' years-long relationship with Epstein was not a one-time moral lapse but part of a long history of unethical behavior.
"I have previously warned about Summers’ unethical behavior and ties to unsavory businesses, but these latest revelations ought to be the final straw," he said. "It is disgusting that Summers has played such a crucial role in government at one of America's premier universities for so long. Companies and institutions affiliated with him—including the world’s most influential AI company, and two of the nation’s premier news outlets—ought to demand his immediate resignation."
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