Explained: Once ‘chainsaw of bureaucracy’, DOGE shut down months before mandate set to end

Named after the eponymous memecoin featuring a Shiba Inu dog, DOGE was launched last November with much fanfare in a bid to slash the government’s size and wasteful public spending. However, critics have maintained that its actual impact was minimal. Here is everything to know

Elon Musk speaks to reporters alongside President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Feb. 11, 2025. (NYT)

With eight months left of its tenure, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has officially disbanded, according to a Reuters report on Sunday (November 23).

When asked about the office, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters that DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore, and that it’s no longer a “centralized entity”. However, Kupor clarified in a separate social media post on Sunday that “the principles of DOGE remain alive and well” and would now be executed by the OPM and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instead.

Good editing by @reuters – spliced my full comments across paragraphs 2/3 to create a grabbing headline 🙂 The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS. But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse;…

— Scott Kupor (@skupor) November 23, 2025

Named after the eponymous memecoin featuring a Shiba Inu dog, DOGE was launched last November with much fanfare in a bid to slash the government’s size and wasteful public spending. This February, Elon Musk, its most visible representative of the organisation, brandished a “chainsaw for bureaucracy” gifted to him by Argentina President Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

However, critics have maintained that its actual impact was minimal. Here is everything to know.

What was DOGE?

The Department of Government Efficiency was originally mooted as the American version of ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’, a stance the Republican Party has long advocated for. DOGE explicitly targeted waste and fraud in the government.

However, DOGE was not established as a government department, but to “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before,” Trump said in a statement last year.

On January 20, the president renamed the existing US Digital Service to US DOGE Service in a presidential action. The action also mandated the creation of the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization as a temporary organisation, to be headed by the USDS administrator. The temporary organisation was given an 18-month mandate to enforce the President’s DOGE agenda, and was set to terminate on July 4, 2026.

While Elon Musk served as the department’s visible face, the White House clarified earlier this year that he had “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself”. In February, the Trump administration appointed Amy Gleason, a former healthcare administrator, to serve as its Acting Head. Since March, Gleason has also served as an advisor to Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

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Criticisms of DOGE

The initiative faced criticism on several grounds.

On its website, DOGE has claimed that it has saved $214 bn, or $1,329 per taxpayer, through a combination of asset sales, contract reconstructions, deletions of redundancies and workforce reductions, among other things. However, the accuracy of these numbers has been under scrutiny following fact-checks by The New York Times, Politico and other organisations, which pointed out errors ranging from miscalculations to misrepresentations of contracts in the original list.

Some experts also flagged the pointlessness of the cancelled contracts, with the eliminated redundancies amounting to “confiscating used ammunition”, according to Charles Tiefer, an expert on government contracting law who spoke to the Associated Press. Some of the cancelled contracts were reportedly for research awards, training completed, software already purchased and interns who had completed their internships.

The primary concern, however, was the use of mass layoffs to reduce ‘wasteful expenditure’, with thousands of federal employees being dismissed in the very first month of the Trump presidency. DOGE thus faced legal challenges over the scope of its mandate, especially its role as a quasi-government organisation with access to the confidential data of thousands of taxpayers.

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In a blog post on the OPM website on Friday, Kupor clarified that the government had hired 68,000 persons this year while 317,000 had left the government, exceeding Trump’s goal of reducing four persons per new hire. He also wrote that “there are no prescribed reductions in headcount,” but the focus is now on “great service delivery with maximum efficiency,” instead of the number of full-time employees.

Moreover, DOGE officials have moved to other offices of the government, such as the OMB, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. For instance, Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia moved from DOGE to the National Design Studio, a new initiative aiming to beautify government websites. Musk himself has altogether exited government following his public quarrel with the president over the One Big Beautiful Bill this June.