The fallout from Elon Musk’s cost-cutting venture can be found across the government if you know where to look.
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When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were initially tapped to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of 2024, the billionaire duo promised DOGE’s last act would be to delete itself by a mandated end date: July 4, 2026.
Numerous lawsuits filed by federal workers, states and activists attempted to halt DOGE’s radical cost cutting effort, arguing Musk’s allies operated with little transparency and targeted agencies, grants and programs enshrined by law.
Now, DOGE’s website, built to house “receipts” documenting its attempt to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, lies dormant, while posts from the DOGE X account have slowed to a trickle.
But weeks after its 18-month end date has elapsed, DOGE has proved remarkably hard to kill.
Instead, DOGE has evolved from its radical cost-cutting mission, with some of its members and agenda embedded across the government, continuing to reshape the federal bureaucracy behind the scenes.
“DOGE is a way of life. … It never terminates,” former DOGE staffer Katie Miller said on X on July 4, the day of its supposed expiration.
Nearly two dozen people hired or vetted through DOGE remain in government, including an influential diaspora filtered throughout the executive branch, according to a Washington Post analysis of court records and government documents.
This includes Gavin Kliger, chief data officer at the Pentagon, and Jeremy Lewin, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Lewin, who oversaw much of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, now directs the State Department’s foreign assistance programs.
Meanwhile, the National Design Studio, which is run by former DOGE lieutenant Joe Gebbia, is seen by many of its members as the spiritual successor to DOGE, according to two people familiar with the organization, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Its chief engineer is Edward Coristine, the staffer known as “Big Balls,” who as a 19-year-old DOGE employee gained access to agencies including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
DOGE’s membership rolls were never made public, so it’s impossible to tally the total number of alumni sprinkled throughout the government. The Trump administration fought lawsuits to make DOGE staffers’ identities public, and some information has only come out recently through public records requests and legal challenges.
Administration officials have retreated from DOGE’s plans, reversing cuts and bringing back workers.
But the upheaval unleashed by the U.S. DOGE Service has left an imprint on the federal government, with consequences still rippling through Washington. DOGE forcibly reworked the operations at agencies such as the Social Security Administration, where staff members were reorganized to make up for losses on the front lines. Unemployment is up in the D.C. metro area since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Federal workers remain fearful of retaliation.
Musk hinted that he hoped DOGE would outlive its initial wave of cuts. “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?” Musk said as his time in government wound down last year. “Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
Among a Republican caucus typically in lockstep, there is internal stratification over DOGE, even as several Trump administration officials have started DOGE-like initiatives. Late last year, the Office of Personnel Management launched a Tech Force to recruit young Silicon Valley types to government.
When Vice President JD Vance introduced an anti-fraud task force, he did not associate it with Musk’s work.
“I think that’s unfortunate that nobody has ever tried to take a systematic look at how much fraud there is in the federal government,” Vance said in a Fox News interview in February.
The White House and Musk did not return requests for comment for this story.
Democrats have continued to capitalize on anger over DOGE, demanding investigations into its staffers’ access to sensitive data and the fallout from cuts. Meanwhile, the debate remains — even among some Republicans — whether the effort was worth its dramatic fallout.
“There were a lot of claims of billions and billions of dollars in savings,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) said in a hearing this month with Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “I simply want to know where you booked them and where I can see it.”
Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said the government is continuing to bear the costs of DOGE’s work, such as the rehiring of federal workers, legal expenses from actions such as the sudden closure of the USAID and paying severance, and diminishing employee morale, resulting in productivity losses.
DOGE and other Trump administration-led cuts have resulted in an economic cost of more than $165 billion, or more than $1,028 per taxpayer, according to Stier’s organization’s estimates. The costs include the loss of estimated economic benefits from terminated grants, the effect of severance payments, estimated legal expenses and money spent on rehiring workers, for example.
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Contrary to the promises Musk offered during the early days, federal spending as a whole actually increased over the past year. Agencies are ramping up hiring plans after hundreds of thousands of federal workers left last year.
For the first six months of Trump’s second term, DOGE was central to the administration. Musk frequently appeared in the Oval Office beside Trump, while his closest associates showed up at federal agencies with little to no warning and made consequential decisions, overruling career staff and even Trump officials. Musk touted cuts that he said would amount to a $2 trillion reduction in federal spending.
Several of DOGE’s more limited priorities remain, including an ongoing effort to digitize federal retirement records that are housed in a Pennsylvania mine. At the end of June, the Office of Personnel Management announced it will no longer send anymore paper to the mine after DOGE engineers built a website to replace the paper forms.
Inside some agencies, meanwhile, DOGE maintains a presence. There “are still an exceptional number that remain today and are more quietly operating behind the scenes,” said one staffer at the Transportation Department, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
At the General Services Administration, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who at one point led Technology Transformation Services, has not left, even though he no longer appears to have any official job at the agency and is listed as a special government employee, according to a GSA employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
Many of those aligned with DOGE who remain in government are working at the National Design Studio, which the White House created to modernize government websites and take on other brand initiatives. The National Design Studio says its mission entails “making the services Americans rely on easier to understand, access, and use,” a focus that echoes DOGE’s aim to upgrade outdated tech and the mandate of DOGE’s predecessor, the U.S. Digital Service. Its work, however, is more narrowly focused than either of those bodies.
Two people close to DOGE, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said the design outfit, led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, serves as the spiritual successor to its work. With about 100 people and weekly meetings focused on efforts such as TrumpRx and the design of the new food pyramid, they represent an evolution of the DOGE mission, but a significant culling of its mandate.
Before the National Design Studio, Gebbia initially focused on redesigning the federal retirement online portal after previous administrations had not been able to fully digitize the process of leaving government. Although the young technologists had hoped to be done with the project in a few months, it took them longer than expected.
At the tech- and politics-focused Hill and Valley Forum earlier this year, Gebbia and Coristine described work that was a far cry from Musk’s chainsaw-wielding approach to government transformation. Gebbia, for example, described pitching Trump and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on the idea for the National Design Studio, saying there might not be another president who cares as deeply “about design, about aesthetics, about architecture,” as Trump.
Not a single reference to the DOGE controversies was uttered during their 20-minute talk, and the friendly moderator, the CEO of the cloud-based design platform Figma, did not ask about it.
While DOGE did not complete its far-fetched goal to cut $2 trillion, the slashing of foreign aid, research and humanities grants has continued to have lasting effects. Health organizations in Africa said aid cuts hampered the global response to a deadly Ebola outbreak. And the administration had to ramp up a response to a screwworm reemergence after cuts at the Agriculture Department.
The Post previously found that children in Congo had died awaiting lifesaving drugs after U.S. aid cuts under Trump. An Oxfam analysis found that the cuts to aid from the United States would lead “to the first rise in under-five child mortality this century.”
Musk has denied such catastrophic impacts, even amid evidence of their occurrence. “There is not even a single dead child!” he said on X in June. “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!”
In some parts of the government, there is a dispute over whether DOGE is still there or not.
At the Social Security Administration, as DOGE team members sought to find savings in the massive mandatory spending program, they were given access to the government’s most sensitive databases, which include the personal information of all Americans living and dead. They ultimately did not find the fraud Musk claimed was there.
In an ongoing court case about DOGE’s access to agency data, the administration has reported that all DOGE members have left the agency and that it has no plans to bring the organization back to Social Security.
Democracy Forward, a legal group challenging DOGE’s access to data, rebutted that and pointed to testimony that Social Security Administration chief information officer Michael Russo had previously identified himself as DOGE, and SSA general counsel Mark Steffensen fought to get DOGE members into sensitive databases. The two are still at the Social Security Administration.
“Rumors of DOGE’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, and DOGE personnel remain at SSA,” plaintiffs told the court.
The Trump administration also sought to get the case dismissed, citing that DOGE wouldn’t exist after July 4. But U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander didn’t buy it.
“Akin to a company that goes out of business,” Hollander wrote in a June 26 opinion, “the DOGE Temporary Organization cannot escape responsibility for the conduct it undertook while it existed simply by reaching its expiration date.”
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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
