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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 However, following a public feud with Musk in late spring, Trump and his team had indicated the department was no longer active, often speaking of DOGE in the past tense.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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‘Children Died Waiting’ After Trump Freeze of USAID Operations Stranded Medications
"Shame," said one Democratic senator. "This is not leadership. This is callous arrogance."
Sep 30, 2025
An investigation published Tuesday reveals how the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid—even those that have been quickly restored under public pressure—have proven deadly for children in poverty-stricken nations.
The halting of a global supply chain program that ships crucial antimalarial and HIV medications around the world was one of President Donald Trump's first actions, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that many of the programs run by the US Agency for International Development "run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy" and moved to end USAID's operations.
Portions of the Global Health Supply Chain Program resumed within days of Trump's executive order suspending foreign aid, but as The Washington Post reported in its exclusive investigation, "the suspension had lingering effects that left aid deliveries severely disrupted for months" and severely reduced public health workers' ability to distribute lifesaving medications, screening tests, and other supplies to more than 40 countries.
While more than $190 million worth of anti-HIV/AIDS and antimalarial supplies were scheduled to arrive at distribution warehouses by the end of June, nearly $76 million did not arrive, including a majority of the medications to fight malaria.
Medical supplies worth $63 million did eventually make it to warehouses, but were delayed by 41 days on average, and many sat on warehouse shelves for weeks instead of being sent to clinics and hospitals.
The newspaper told the story of five-year-old Suza Kenyaba, one victim of the delay in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who contracted malaria when the medication supply chain was in a state of chaos due to Trump's order.
"The Trump administration's claim that no one has died from cuts to USAID is devastatingly and disastrously untrue."
The medication the little girl needed was just seven miles away from the clinic where she was battling a high fever caused by the infection, but the disruption to the supply chain program left the medicine stranded in a warehouse.
"The medication that USAID sent was seven miles away due to Trump chaos and suspensions," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). "It would have saved her life. Shame. This is not leadership. This is callous arrogance."
The Post published its report a week after Rubio appeared on ABC News and told anchor George Stephanopoulos flatly that "no one has died because the United States has cut aid."
The secretary of state claimed—contrary to evidence—that the administration had simply worked to structure programs to make them more efficient.
But as the Post reported, the stop-work order issued by the administration had rippling effects across the foreign aid pipeline. Chemonics, a contractor that operates the Global Health Supply Chain Program, lost access to a government payment system, inhibiting its "ability to order suppliers to resume work.” As a result, it was forced to furlough 750 people in its US workforce as well as lay off local staff.
While Rubio rolled back some of the foreign aid cuts in late January, issuing a blanket waiver for "lifesaving humanitarian assistance," Chemonics' logistics program that delivers medications from local warehouses to clinics like the one where Kenyaba was fighting malaria was not included in the waiver.
The investigation revealed, said one observer, that Trump has the "deaths of children on his hands."
Oxfam America called on Congress to "fund lifesaving aid."
"The Trump administration's claim that no one has died from cuts to USAID is devastatingly and disastrously untrue," said the group. "Their attacks on USAID stranded lifesaving medication and children died waiting."
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Supreme Court Lets Trump Withhold $4 Billion in Foreign Aid Approved by Congress
"This result further erodes separation of powers principles that are fundamental to our constitutional order," said one critic.
Sep 26, 2025
The US Supreme Court on Friday gave President Donald Trump the green light to withhold billions of dollars of congressionally approved foreign aid, a major win for the White House and executive authority and, according to critics, a body blow to the bedrock constitutional principle of congressional power of the purse.
At issue in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition is $4 billion in foreign aid allocated by Congress that the Trump administration determined was wasteful, including funding for international public health such as HIV prevention programs, which have been credited with saving millions of lives.
The high court's right-wing majority found that "the asserted harms to the executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm" to aid recipients, while cautioning that "this order should not be read as a final determination on the merits."
BREAKING: Supreme Court lets Trump unilaterally freeze billions in congressionally appropriated foreign aid money apparent 6-3 vote with liberals in dissent @courthousenews.bsky.social
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— Kelsey Reichmann (@kelseyreichmann.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 1:43 PM
The Trump administration sought not only validation of its claimed ability to claw back spending previously approved by Congress—which under the Constitution generally holds power of the purse—but also of "pocket recission," a highly contentious budgetary maneuver to cancel previously approved federal expenditures by exploiting legal ambiguity in the Impoundment Control Act (ICA).
Democrats and many legal experts contend that pocket recissions are illegal, and Democratic lawmakers warned even before Trump's White House return that he would try to use the tactic in order to refuse to disburse funds allocated by Congress for social programs.
Justice Elena Kagan—who dissented along with fellow liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—asserted that the majority approved "essentially a presidential usurpation of Congress' power of the purse."
"The stakes are high: At issue is the allocation of power between the executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies," Kagan said.
“That is just the price of living under a Constitution that gives Congress the power to make spending decisions through the enactment of appropriations laws,” she wrote. “If those laws require obligation of the money, and if Congress has not by rescission or other action relieved the executive of that duty, then the executive must comply.”
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court dealt a temporary blow to Trump's evisceration of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a ruling that left intact a lower court's decision ordering the resumption of approximately $2 billion in foreign aid frozen by the administration.
Friday's ruling could complicate bipartisan negotiations to avert a Republican government shutdown as the September 30 deadline looms. Democratic negotiators now worry that Trump, buoyed by the high court decision, could again refuse to spend funds designated by Congress.
“Today’s ruling allows the administration to unilaterally refuse to spend $4 billion in foreign assistance funds that it is required by law to spend," said Nicolas Sansone, an attorney at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and counsel for the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. "This result further erodes separation of powers principles that are fundamental to our constitutional order. It will also have a grave humanitarian impact.”
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