It was a bad time, but not for long: the US Department of Government Effectiveness, or DOGE, was officially disbanded.
A shadowy department led by tech billionaire Elon Musk that fired scores of employees. workers and gutted parts of the federal government faded into oblivion, according to an exclusive report from Reuters.
When Reuters reporters asked about a department that set out to cut government spending but failed to deliver on its promises and created chaos in the federal workforce, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor responded: “There is no such thing.”
DOGE is no longer a “centralized organization,” he added.
According to the report, the Trump administration has been signaling the end of DOGE since the summer, and the president routinely talks about it in past tense. Many DOGE employees have since found jobs elsewhere in government, such as Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, who is now RFK Jr.'s official advisor to the Department of Health and Human Services.
DOGE's legacy is both very stupid and very sad: it destroyed the federal workforceincluding Social Security staff in local offices and made it easier for hackers access your data. The agency broke up USAID, resulting in hundreds of thousands from lives lost globally. And all this for the sake of projected savings – numbers that became smaller and less ambitious every time Musk mentions them.
While DOGE may become a fever dream for Trump's first 100 days in office, its consequences—and the suffering it has caused—will be felt for a long time.
