Recruit and structure the team
1. Make agency assignments
2. Place staff members in key offices
3. Get access to data and systems
7. Attack agencies publicly
Repeat, agency after agency
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has appeared at agency after agency to slash spending and cut the federal work force. Here’s how DOGE employees do it.
Illustration showing the Department of Government Efficiency as an orange rectangle with an arrow connecting it to a generic federal agency. The arrow continues through the agency and touches icons labeled “access databases,” “cancel contracts,” and “cut jobs,” signifying actions that DOGE is taking at federal agencies across the government.
A diagram shows two agencies linked to the White House and created by law. They are the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. It also shows DOGE linked to the White House, indicating that it was created by executive order. Arrows from DOGE point to the two agencies, with icons representing DOGE staff members shown in each.
With staff on board, the DOGE playbook moves to other agencies. DOGE has sent small groups of employees to agencies like the Department of Education to carry out the president’s cost-cutting mission. These groups vary in makeup, and have included software engineers, lawyers, human resources managers and finance professionals, most of whom do not have prior government experience.
Four DOGE staff members are labeled team lead, lawyer, H.R. manager and software engineer.
By early February, DOGE had arrived at more than 15 agencies, including the Departments of the Treasury, Agriculture and Homeland Security, where staff members were assigned roles and email addresses in high-level offices.
Four DOGE staffers move below a diagram of an agency. Two members join the Finance Department where they will get access to spending and contracts; one member joins Information Technology and gets access to data; and the final member joins the H.R. and Management, where there is influence for hiring and firing employees.
DOGE engineers have sought access to agency data, including the sensitive personal information of U.S. residents, in the name of reducing fraud and abuse. At the Treasury Department, two DOGE staffers worked with the technology and financial offices to gain access to critical payment systems, a move later blocked by a judge.
Two staff members move into technology and finance at the Treasury Department, which has a line leading to an icon labeled “Social security numbers and private banking information” with a locked box around it.
Mr. Musk has become fixated on finding fraud at the Social Security Administration, deploying at least 12 staff members to the agency to scrutinize its internal databases. According to a memo sent to the agency, DOGE proposed marking dead in a database nearly all U.S. residents who are more than 120 years old and meet other criteria. Experts, however, say the relatively small amount of improper Social Security payments — estimated at less than 1 percent of paid benefits — has little to do with dead people.
A federal judge filed a temporary restraining order barring the group’s access and castigating the team’s fraud work. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” wrote the judge, Ellen Lipton Hollander.
Besides gaining access to data, DOGE has focused on contracts, which it has worked to cancel in collaboration with agency leadership. At the Department of Agriculture, civil servants were told to follow a flowchart like the one above to identify contracts to eliminate, according to an internal agency document.
A decision tree diagram with a series of questions that begins with “Is the contract funded by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act or his infrastructure law?” If yes, terminate all contracts. Otherwise, does the contract provide money for D.E.I. or environmental justice? If it does not, does it provide foreign financial assistance? If it does provide foreign assistance and it happened after Trump’s inauguration, or if it includes D.E.I. or environmental justice language, terminate or review the contract . If it does not provide foreign assistance or include D.E.I. or environmental justice, continue paying.
DOGE has even targeted spending that falls outside the typical Republican campaign promises. The Department of Agriculture canceled contracts that pay farmers to deliver fresh, local produce to schools and food banks. These programs were also a boon to farmers, many of whom made new investments to meet the demand.
“For many kids, breakfast and lunch at school is all they’re eating,” said Emma Jagoz, a farmer in Maryland who supplies food through the program. “Now they will have less access to nutrient-dense foods and fewer produce options for their breakfast and lunch.”
More than two dozen lawsuits have challenged DOGE’s cuts. In at least six cases, a federal judge ruled that the executive branch overstepped its bounds by cutting congressionally mandated spending and ordered the resumption of federal funding.
DOGE and its partner agencies have sent cost-cutting instructions to the leadership at numerous agencies. Agency staff members were then told to review lists of hundreds of contracts, identify spending to cut, and justify any spending they wanted to remain.
A list of categories for cutting spending appears with empty boxes next to them. The list includes Jan. 6 prosecution firms, media subscriptions, consulting contracts, Biden’s infrastructure law, software licenses, top consulting agencies, climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act, D.E.I. initiatives, environmental justice, educational grants, conference travel, building leases and foreign aid. A checkmark animates into the empty boxes.
At the same time that agency employees were doing the reviews, DOGE worked to force those same employees out. A memo directed agency heads to work with DOGE to eliminate staff members in “noncritical” positions through buyout programs, probationary employee layoffs, terminating jobs and technology automation.
A group of icons representing the federal work force appears. Some of these icons fade away, representing cuts to probationary workers, D.E.I. staff, inspectors general and mass layoffs.
At some agencies, managers said they have been asked to eliminate at least 40 percent or more of their staff, cuts they say they cannot make without jeopardizing their agencies’ missions and sapping morale.
“Every meeting someone’s crying. Our mission has been completely demolished,” said a manager at the Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Even infrastructure-focused agencies, like the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages projects providing water and power to the West, are not immune from these actions.
“I thought Reclamation would be spared because of the criticality of our work,” said a former manager who has since left the government and also spoke on condition of anonymity. “I was disabused of that notion.”
Mr. Musk has used the social media platform X, which he owns, to amplify baseless claims about the agencies where DOGE is involved, at times signaling when the next agency is in his sights. He posted “CFPB RIP” the day before offices of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were closed and its 1,700 employees were sent home.
A collection of tweets from Elon appears. The tweets read: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead,” “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”, “CFPB RIP”, “Something shady was going on at that organization,” “This will fix a major fraud problem with SSA.” and “Delete the NGOs.”
DOGE has attempted to make sweeping changes at a furious pace, and Mr. Musk has acknowledged they will make some mistakes as a result. Some fired workers have been rehired. The team’s “wall of receipts” website promoting its savings has been riddled with billion-dollar errors overstating the size of the cuts.
The operation has shifted its strategy to address legal challenges. When early lawsuits attempted to stop the group from accessing agency databases, the unit adjusted by simply having its staff members formally hired. The amorphous nature of DOGE extends to Mr. Musk, who publicly takes credit for its work, but, as stated by the administration in court, has no formal connection to the entity.
DOGE has insisted its efforts are meant to fight waste, fraud and abuse, but there is already a federal body with that responsibility: the Offices of Inspectors General. In testimony to the House this month, a former inspector general said that DOGE did not have the experience, standards or accountability to Congress to replace the Offices of Inspectors General.
“I believe that the administration has missed the mark in relying on the Department of Government Efficiency to identify and root out waste rather than the mechanism that already exists,” said John Roth, the former inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security.
Many of DOGE’s actions have been blocked or reversed by the courts. Even still, Mr. Musk’s team has fanned out across the government, taking new positions of leadership in agencies and becoming a part of the fabric of the federal bureaucracy it has sought to reshape.
A list of more than 30 agencies appears, taking up the entire visual. The text changes color from black to orange to signify DOGE’s involvement with each of the departments. The list includes: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Commerce, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Labor, Office of Personnel Management, Social Security Administration, State Department, Federal Aviation Administration, Treasury Department, Department of Agriculture and Department of Veterans Affairs.
