DOGE’s Inefficiency: An Overview of a Very Early Founder and the Challenges it’s Leading to today and tomorrow

DOGE’s very genesis was marked by inefficiency: A week after the November election, Trump announced the entity would be co-led by Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate.

An executive order Trump signed on his first day in office gave DOGE a place in the White House, where it could direct action, even though the organization was originally described as operating outside the government.

Some agencies have upwards of a dozen DOGE-affiliated personnel, while others have just one or two. A small number of DOGE-linked staffers have been working at multiple federal agencies at the same time.

According to its website, DOGE claims to have saved $160 billion by canceling contracts and firing workers. NPR has reported the tracker is plagued with errors and overstatements.

The five contract cancellations with the most claimed savings, accounting for nearly $7.5 billion in the DOGE tracker, actually amount to just under $1 billion in potential savings. The contract that was never awarded and one that was already terminated is part of the equation, as DOGE continues to use misleading math.

The General Services Administration worker, who asked to stay anonymous for fear of being retaliated against, said that the Trump administration has been searching for ways to cut their budget, regardless of whether it is cutting staff, contracts or grants.

Another Musk-driven initiative asked employees to send weekly emails to the Office of Personnel Management outlining five things they accomplished. Cabinet officials gave conflicting instructions on whether the employees should comply with the emails. Musk and Trump claimed the email was meant to identify federal workers who don’t actually exist — an allegation for which they provided no evidence.

Tens of thousands of workers are still in a probationary period because they had recently been hired or promoted.

Some firings were so abrupt that agencies scrambled to bring back terminated staff, including those at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Others saw employees fired, then unfired, before being fired again.

While challenges to those terminations have worked their way through the legal system, some agencies have said court-ordered reinstatement caused “significant administrative burdens.” The Supreme Court and a federal appeals court paused the rulings, which allowed firings to continue.

The “fork in the road” resignation offer for federal employees to get paid through September without having to work was similarly pushed by Musk after taking over TWotter. Some workers accepted the offer, but were told they couldn’t take it.

A Department of Agriculture employee, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation in their job, was approved to take the resignation offer and was supposed to go on administrative leave on May 1. On Apr. 23, the employee received an email notifying them their job was considered “mission critical” and asking them to “reconsider their enrollment.” They still plan to leave.

“At this point, it’s their loss after firing [probationary employees], rehiring, uncertainty, mental anguish, being kept in the dark about decisions that affect your livelihood,” the employee said. “It isn’t fair to Americans because we will all feel the effects of agencies that can’t run effectively, but that’s not my fault. It’s the fault of the decision makers.”

The layoffs are likely to have far-reaching ramifications in communities across the country: the federal government is the nation’s largest employer and more than 80% of its employees live outside of the Washington, D.C., metro area.

“People are dropping like flies in terms of those who are eligible for retirement,” said an employee at the Internal Revenue Service, to whom NPR granted anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration. Since they can’t hire, it makes a lot of work for everyone else. So many people can’t do their jobs because of the lack of people.”

“We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people. Musk said during a February Cabinet meeting that there are fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks.

Musk has similarly claimed, without providing proof, that the Social Security system is plagued by “extreme levels of fraud,” including benefits checks going to dead people and recipients who are impossibly listed as well over 100 years old in the SSA database. The inspector general and the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration have debunked his claims.

Why haven’t federal workers been ordered back into offices? A federal judge in a case against the Department of Homeland Security over a single source of non-citizen status

Federal workers who still have jobs have been ordered back into offices, only to face shortages of desks, internet bandwidth, and even toilet paper. Dozens of workers across multiple agencies told NPR the return to office mandate has made them less productive and flies in the face of previous efforts to encourage telework, including under Trump’s first term, which the federal government estimates has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced costs.

A Food and Drug Administration employee who asked to remain anonymous said that the goal of remote work and telework was to bring down the taxpayer burden. An office was assigned to the employee with insufficient space. “This is not sustainable. The employee who spoke said that they were going to have to get bigger spaces.

Many workers say the ability to do their job is being stymied by the freeze on government-issued payment cards, which has also disrupted their ability to buy supplies and services. Routine spending now has to be approved by leadership at some agencies, leading to long delays.

“We are literally jumping for joy over here in our local office because HQ/DOGE has approved our expenses to pump [a] vault toilet at one of our field offices,” said one worker at the Bureau of Land Management, who requested anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration. It took a long time for this to be approved.

In a case against the Office of Personnel Management, the Treasury Department and Education Department, a federal judge found agencies shared data with DOGE affiliates “who had no need to know the vast amount of sensitive personal information to which they were granted access.”

A judge wrote that gaining broad access to Social Security data instead of a more narrow approach was akin to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer. The court was worried about the risk of sensitive Treasury Department data being shared outside of the agency.

The Department of Homeland Security announced last week that DOGE assisted in the creation of a single, reliable source for verification of non-citizen status nationwide.

“Over and over, newly appointed agency heads have explained that they are reorganizing, eliminating programs, and cutting thousands upon thousands of jobs, because the President directed them to and because DOGE told them how much and what to cut.”

“I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, probably the remainder of the president’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back, which will do if it has the chance,” he said.

When President Trump returned to the White House in January, he promised to “restore competence and effectiveness” to the federal government by establishing a Department of Government Efficiency.

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Many of DOGE’s initiatives have been reversed or delayed after legal setbacks and backlash in the court of public opinion. Since Jan. 20, dozens of federal lawsuits have challenged DOGE’s activities or mentioned its actions, according to NPR’s review of district court dockets across the U.S.

Despite those claims, 100 days into Trump’s second term, DOGE has yet to deliver on its promised savings, efficiency or transparency.

Trump has touted these moves as restoring accountability. He says that the American people gave him a mandate to rid the federal government of waste, fraud and inefficiency.

OMB and OPM have issued memos on how to implement Trump’s order and the plaintiffs want the court to throw it out. They have also asked the court to void agencies’ “reduction in force” or RIF plans, arguing that the compressed timeline — only a matter of weeks — set forth by the Trump administration for submitting those plans for approval could not have allowed for proper compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements.

In a lawsuit filed late Monday, the plaintiffs charge that actions taken by the president, Elon Musk and the heads of nearly two dozen federal agencies to dramatically downsize the federal workforce violate the Constitution because Congress has not authorized them.

A coalition of labor unions, nonprofits and local governments including Chicago, Baltimore and Harris County, Texas, has mounted the broadest legal challenge yet to President Trump’s massive overhaul of the federal government.

Congress, which is led by Republican allies of Trump, has been silent since the president shut down federal facilities and ordered the dismissal of federal workers.