Nov. 24, 2025, 11:48 a.m. ET
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is officially no more. It was less than a year old.
DOGE, as it became known, hasn’t been run by Musk for months. He left earlier this summer after his feud with President Donald Trump erupted into public view.
Now, the entity Musk led to overhaul the U.S. government in myriad cost-cutting ways has officially been disbanded. That’s despite Trump’s original intention that DOGE keep working until the middle of 2026.
The Director of the Office of Personnel Management Scott Kupor confirmed in a social media post on Nov. 23 that DOGE does “not have centralized leadership.” Reuters first reported the initiative no longer exists.
Created by Trump in his first day in office in January and helmed by Musk, DOGE upended many corners of the federal government in the first few months of the president’s second term. Trump sold the effort as a follow-through on campaign promises to overhaul the government and slash the federal budget, which he and other MAGA and Republican allies criticized as wasteful and inefficient.
During its tenure, DOGE seized control of information technology infrastructure, axed federal government contracts and pushed out or fired tens of thousands of workers across the country. But its splashiest raison d’être, to cut between $1 and $2 trillion dollars from the federal government’s spending, failed to materialize.
What was DOGE?
Trump’s executive order setting up the initiative described its goal as a reduction in spending and to eliminate “waste, bloat, and insularity” in the federal bureaucracy.
It came after Trump and Musk forged a close relationship during the 2024 presidential campaign and where the Tesla and Space X CEO poured more than a quarter-billion dollars into campaign committees supporting Trump, namely in the closing weeks of the White House race with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Trump first proposed a government efficiency commission in September 2024 at the Economic Club of New York. At the time, he said the commission would conduct “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and recommend changes. Over the next few months, it morphed into a department, as Musk and Trump discussed the project in public interviews and campaign events.
A week after Election Day, Trump officially announced the creation of DOGE, saying it could become “the Manhattan Project of our time.” Musk and fellow billionaire and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy were initially tapped as its leads, though Ramaswamy later dropped out of the initiative.
Its acronym, DOGE, refers to Dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency that Musk supported. In 2023, he even temporarily changed the logo on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to the cryptocurrency’s dog logo, triggering a spike in Dogecoin value.
Even after Musk’s exit in May, DOGE was intended to continue operations until the summer of 2026, under Trump’s January executive order. But as of mid-November, it has had about a 10-month life span.
What did DOGE do?
Within DOGE’s first 100 days, it led layoffs and buyouts that left thousands of federal workers out of their jobs.
Starting in February, DOGE and the administration undertook mass firings and buyouts of federal workers. The first round of firings came after buyouts were offered to all federal employees, which more than 75,000 workers accepted. Within a few months of its establishment, DOGE faced several legal challenges and was at the center of protests from laid-off employees.
Musk repeatedly claimed the agency would reduce government spending. First, he said it would cut $2 trillion within its first year, then revised that to $1 trillion. In April, Musk appeared to lower that figure even more significantly, saying at a cabinet meeting DOGE will cut $150 billion in spending over the next fiscal year.
DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in federal government expenditures since it was created, though the agency has not provided access to its accounting methods, and its estimates have not been independently verified.
According to the agency’s own calculations published on its website, it fell short of that goal. As of Nov. 23, DOGE claims it reached $214 billion in savings − less than a quarter of its most conservative promises.
Contributing: Joey Garrison, USA TODAY
Kathryn Palmer is a politics reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her atkapalmer@usatoday.com and on X @KathrynPlmr.
