Inside Musk’s plan for DOGE to slash government costs

After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Musk did at X, his social media platform.
As President-elect Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its coleaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.
An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives, and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the US government in the name of cost-cutting.
This story is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
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On the eve of Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks are paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
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Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.
But parts of the operation are becoming clear: Many executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Musk has said they will not be paid — a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives — and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks. Some, including possibly Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.
The representatives will largely be stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials, DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty to Musk or Ramaswamy.
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“The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naive billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation,” said Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration with associates who have considered joining DOGE.
“The friends I know have huge lives,” Traina said, “and they’re agreeing to work for free for six months, and leave their families and roll up their sleeves in an attempt to really turn things around. You can view it either way.”
DOGE leaders have told others that the minority of people not detailed to agencies would be housed within the Executive Office of the President at the US Digital Service, which was created in 2014 by former president Barack Obama to “change our government’s approach to technology.”
DOGE is also expected to have an office in the Office of Management and Budget, and officials have also considered forming a think tank outside the government in the future.
Musk’s friends have been intimately involved in choosing people who are set to be deployed to various agencies. Those who have conducted interviews for DOGE include Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Shaun Maguire, Baris Akis, and others who have a personal connection to Musk. Some who have received the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious grant funded by Thiel given to those who promise to skip or drop out of college to become entrepreneurs, are involved with programming and operations for DOGE. Brokering an introduction to Musk or Ramaswamy, or their inner circles, has been a key way for leaders to be picked for deployment.
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These recruits are assigned to specific agencies where they are thought to have expertise. Some other DOGE enrollees have come to the attention of Musk and Ramaswamy through X. In recent weeks, DOGE’s account on X has posted requests to recruit a “very small number” of full-time salaried positions for engineers and back-office functions like human resources.
The DOGE team, including those paid engineers, is largely working out of a glass building in SpaceX’s downtown office located a few blocks from the White House. Some people close to Ramaswamy and Musk hope that these DOGE engineers can use artificial intelligence to find cost-cutting opportunities.
The broader effort is being run by two people with starkly different backgrounds: One is Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and former top health official in Trump’s first White House who is close with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Smith has effectively been running DOGE during the transition period, with a particular focus on recruiting, especially for the workers who will be embedded at the agencies.
Smith has been working closely with Steve Davis, a collaborator of Musk’s for two decades who is widely seen as working as Musk’s proxy on all things. Davis has joined Musk as he calls experts with questions about the federal budget, for instance.
Other people involved include Matt Luby, Ramaswamy’s chief of staff and childhood friend; Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign official; and Rachel Riley, a McKinsey partner who works closely with Smith.
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Despite all this firepower, many budget experts have been deeply skeptical about the effort and its cost-cutting ambitions. Musk initially said the effort could result in “at least $2 trillion” in cuts from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. But budget experts say that goal would be difficult to achieve without slashing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has promised not to cut.
Both Musk and Ramaswamy have also recast what success might mean. Ramaswamy emphasized DOGE-led deregulation on X last month, saying that removing regulations could stimulate the economy and that “the success of DOGE can’t be measured through deficit reduction alone.”
And in an interview last week with Mark Penn, the chair and CEO of Stagwell, a marketing company, Musk downplayed the total potential savings.
“We’ll try for $2 trillion — I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Musk said. “You kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.