By Khabibulla Khayrullaev, UWED undergraduate, intern at IAIS
Origins and Institutional Framework
On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14158, establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Structured as a temporary division embedded within the existing United States Digital Service (renamed the United States DOGE Service), the organization was assigned an 18-month mandate with a formal termination date of July 4, 2026 – the 250th anniversary of American independence, which Trump called “the perfect gift to America”. Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who had donated more than $290 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign — the largest individual political donation in American history — led DOGE as a “special government employee”, a status permitting a maximum of 130 working days per year.
DOGE’s stated mission was to modernize federal information technology, maximize productivity, and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. In practice, teams of young technology professionals, many recruited directly from Musk’s own companies or straight out of college, were deployed across dozens of federal agencies with broad authority to cancel contracts, terminate grants, and facilitate mass layoffs, operating with limited interagency coordination and frequently without prior legal review.
The Savings Claim: What DOGE Says vs. What Analysts Find
DOGE’s official “wall of receipts”, a public tally on its website, claims between $160 and $215 billion in savings as of early 2026. Musk’s original public promise of $2 trillion was subsequently revised downward to $1 trillion, then further to $150–200 billion — a reduction of more than 90% from the initial target. A February 2026 CBS News investigation found that the 13 largest claimed cancellations were all incorrect, and journalists identified billions of dollars in miscounting.
A rigorous counter-analysis by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service estimated that DOGE’s actions — including paying tens of thousands of employees for months of unworked leave under the ‘Fork in the Road’ deferred-resignation program, litigation costs, and precipitous productivity losses — will cost taxpayers $135 billion in fiscal year 2026 alone. The Yale Budget Lab separately calculated that the reduction of IRS staffing by roughly 40% will cost the federal government $323 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade due to reduced auditing capacity and lower compliance rates.
In a deposition made public in March 2026, DOGE employee Nate Cavanaugh acknowledged that cost-cutting efforts fell far short of the original $2 trillion goal. The deposition was part of a lawsuit filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, alleging that DOGE used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to algorithmically identify and cancel more than $100 million in diversity, equity, and inclusion grants, a practice critics described as using automation to circumvent congressional authorization. In total, DOGE claimed to have canceled 13,440 contracts and eliminated the roles of more than 300,000 federal employees.
The Human Toll: Federal Workers Left Behind
Between January 2025 and January 2026, 386,826 workers departed the federal government, including approximately 17,000 through formal reductions in force and many thousands more through DOGE’s ‘Fork in the Road’ deferred-resignation offer. Simultaneously, only 122,000 new workers joined the federal workforce – a 55% decrease from 2024 hiring levels. Among those fired, 24,000 were subsequently rehired following court orders finding the terminations unlawful, including bird flu researchers at the Department of Agriculture who had been dismissed without apparent awareness of their role.
An NBC News investigation published April 22, 2026 spoke with 13 former federal employees and found that seven remain fully unemployed. The organization WellFed, which supports displaced federal workers, estimates that only 25% of its members have found new employment. Among former USAID workers, the group OneAID estimates at least 50% remain unemployed. Unemployment benefits have lapsed for many; healthcare coverage has become precarious. One former IRS employee described the 2026 tax filing season as likely the most difficult "since the pandemic," citing severe understaffing and mounting backlogs.
The GAO Report and Data Security Failures (April 28, 2026)
In what represents one of the most significant institutional accountability findings of the DOGE era, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report on April 28, 2026 concluding that the Treasury Department granted a DOGE associate access to sensitive federal payment systems, systems that process trillions of dollars in government transactions, without fully following its own security controls. The GAO confirmed that DOGE personnel did not always comply with Treasury’s established protocols either.
The DOGE employee central to the GAO‘s findings was Marko Elez, who resigned from Treasury on February 6, 2025after the public disclosure of racist social media posts and subsequently went on to work for DOGE at other agencies. The GAO found that Treasury’s data loss prevention tools failed to block Elez from improperly sending unencrypted information on foreign aid to DOGE associates at the General Services Administration. Rep. Richard Neal, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, stated that “GAO has confirmed our worst fears”. The GAO confirmed it is working on additional audits of DOGE access across other government systems.
Musk’s Departure and What Remained
Elon Musk officially departed his role on May 29, 2025, upon the expiration of his 130-day “special government employee” term. His departure was accompanied by a post on X stating: “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government”. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that DOGE employees embedded in agencies as political appointees would remain: “The DOGE leaders are each and every member of the president’s cabinet, and the president himself”.
Approximately 100 DOGE employees remain embedded across federal departments, having transitioned from their temporary DOGE roles into permanent political appointments. The administration has simultaneously launched a Gen Z federal hiring initiative – the “US Tech Force” — to rebuild federal technology capacity using young software engineers and AI specialists recruited from Silicon Valley. The Office of Personnel Management has contracted with Workday, Inc.to process federal retirement applications, marking a significant step toward the privatization of core governmental functions.
At the same time, the administration’s proposed 2027 federal budget seeks to nearly halve NASA’s budget from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion, while DOGE has claimed to have worked with the National Science Foundation to cancel DEI-related grants. A 57% majority of Americans, according to a Washington Post–ABC–Ipsos poll, disapprove of the way Musk handled his role in the Trump administration. About six in ten say they are worried the president has done too much to cut the size of the federal government.
The July 4 Terminus: End of an Organization, Continuation of a Project
DOGE is scheduled to formally dissolve on July 4, 2026, coinciding with Trump’s proposed “Great American Fair” celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The formal termination of the organization, however, will not end the restructuring it has initiated. The civil service hiring criteria introduced under DOGE, which require applicants to submit essays articulating alignment with the administration’s policy goals, represent a fundamental departure from the merit-based system established by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. The AI Deregulation Decision Tool, designed to analyze and eliminate half of the federal government’s 200,000+ regulations by January 2027, continues its work.
The DOGE experiment has demonstrated that the American federal bureaucracy can be disrupted at speed and at scale through a combination of executive authority and private-sector aggressiveness. It has also demonstrated the institutional costs of disruption without adequate process: billions of dollars in litigation, hundreds of thousands of displaced workers, degraded service capacity in agencies from the IRS to the VA, and now a formal GAO finding of security failures in the handling of the government’s most sensitive financial systems. Whether the restructuring that emerges from this process produces a more efficient state or merely a more politically compliant one – remains the defining question of DOGE’s contested legacy.
* The Institute for Advanced International Studies (IAIS) does not take institutional positions on any issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IAIS.
