The death of DOGE has been greatly exaggerated.
Elon Musk has exited Washington, but the remnants of the Department of Government Efficiency are not done slashing wasteful federal spending.
Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, denied reports that DOGE is dead, and accused a Reuters article of taking his comments out of context when he said the infamous department “doesn’t exist anymore.”
He said the waste-cutting operation is no longer operating under a single department, “but the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: deregulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; reshaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen, etc.”
The department’s website hasn’t posted news of new cuts since August, but it remains active on X, which is owned by Mr. Musk.
The official DOGE handle bragged on Sunday that DOGE workers had eliminated or narrowed 78 “wasteful” contracts worth $1.9 billion. The slashed contracts included a $616,000 IT contract paid by the Health and Human Services Department for “social media monitoring platform subscription,” and a $4.3 million IRS contract for “Inflation Reduction Act transformation project management support”.
And yet, DOGE gets very little mention these days from Mr. Trump or the administration.
Mr. Musk left his DOGE leadership post in May after 134 days and $200 billion in cuts — far fewer than the $2 trillion in federal spending reductions he once predicted he could achieve.
After Mr. Musk’s departure, DOGE was still vilified for cutting favored programs and forcing out essential government employees, even though only a tiny fraction of the federal workforce was let go and most did not show up at the office.
Polls showed a plurality of voters disapproved of DOGE’s spending ax, even though much of the canceled funding was duplicative, potentially fraudulent or supporting questionable initiatives outside the U.S.
The DOGE team, made up of young software engineers and fellow CEOs, uncovered eye-popping expenditures, including $59 million by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide high-end hotel rooms for illegal immigrants in New York City.
Many DOGE employees were dispersed to other government departments or are working for OPM, which is reshaping the federal government’s hiring process.
Mr. Kupor said DOGE “catalyzed” spending changes in the government that the agencies, along with the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, will institutionalize.
Mr. Kupor posted a memo about Mr. Trump’s recent executive order directing agency heads to submit plans to reform how they hire workers to focus on merit and to slim down the government’s army of hiring managers and federal contractors.
Mr. Kupor said the goal is to “not to focus on the raw number of full-time employees, but rather to focus on great service delivery with maximum efficiency.”
Mr. Kupor said the agency has exceeded Mr. Trump’s target goal of reducing the federal government by four jobs for every new person hired.
The government has hired 68,000 people this year, while about 317,000 people have left their government jobs.
Democrats never supported DOGE and said it hurt the government.
Sen. Patty Murray, Washington Democrat, on Monday called DOGE a catastrophic failure, “taking a wrecking ball to everything from cancer research to lifesaving humanitarian aid that will almost certainly lead to millions of preventable deaths.”
