The Trump administration has effectively disbanded the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, eight months before its charter ends, while shifting its cost cutting machinery into existing agencies and new White House backed initiatives.
Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor confirmed DOGE’s demise in an interview earlier this month, saying “That doesn’t exist” when asked about the unit and adding that it is no longer a “centralized entity.”
Kupor said OPM, the federal government’s human resources office, has assumed many DOGE functions, according to his comments and documents reviewed by Reuters.
The quiet shutdown also conflicts with Trump’s own executive order, which set DOGE’s mandate to run through July 2026.
White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said in an email that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment.”
The move ends an initiative launched in January of President Donald Trump’s second term and promoted for months as the signature vehicle to slash the size and scope of the federal government. DOGE made early, highly visible pushes to shrink agencies, cut budgets or redirect their work toward Trump priorities and claimed to have slashed “tens of billions of dollars” in expenditures, yet it never released detailed public accounting that would allow outside experts to verify those savings.
READ: DOGE Spending Cuts Fall Far Short of Musk’s $2 Trillion Promise
Trump and his allies had aggressively marketed DOGE in its early months. Billionaire Elon Musk led the unit initially and repeatedly touted its work on X, while Trump advisers and cabinet secretaries amplified its projects across social media. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in February, Musk famously hoisted a chainsaw and declared “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
Who let the DOGE out?
Even as DOGE faded, Trump officials publicly signaled the shift without explicitly announcing the unit’s closure. Trump now speaks of DOGE in the past tense. Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, who came from healthcare technology, formally became an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy in March.
Republican-controlled states such as Idaho and Florida are meanwhile creating local bodies modeled on DOGE’s approach.
Another key DOGE offshoot is the National Design Studio, created by Trump through an executive order in August and tasked with beautifying federal websites. Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, leads the studio, and at least two prominent DOGE staffers followed him into the new entity. The design studio has already launched websites to recruit law enforcement officers for Washington, DC patrols and to advertise Trump’s drug pricing program.
DOGE’s early imprint is also visible in senior appointments across the government. Zachary Terrell, part of the team that gained access to federal health systems in the early days of Trump’s second term, now serves as chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rachel Riley, who held the same access according to court filings, is now chief of the Office of Naval Research. Jeremy Lewin, who helped Musk and the administration dismantle the USAID, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department.
The administration has also unwound one of DOGE’s most concrete tools, its aggressive hiring constraint. On Trump’s first day in office, federal agencies were barred from hiring new staff except for roles tied to immigration enforcement and public safety, and DOGE later enforced a target of no more than one new employee for every four departures.
Kupor said the government wide hiring freeze is now over and confirmed “There is no target around reductions” anymore.
Musk’s original DOGE mandate centered on what he called “deleting the mountain” of federal regulations, remaking the government with artificial intelligence and eliminating federal jobs. While the DOGE label has vanished and Musk has left Washington after a public feud with Trump in May, the regulatory strand of that program remains active. The White House budget office has tasked Scott Langmack, DOGE’s former representative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with building custom AI tools to scan US regulations and identify rules to eliminate, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Musk has since reappeared in Washington, attending a White House dinner this week for Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
DOGE as a centralized cost cutting unit is gone, but its alumni, its projects and its deregulatory ambitions have been woven into the permanent bureaucracy that it was originally created to cut.
Information for this story was found via Reuters and the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
