A postmortem on DOGE's demise is crucial

Shortly after his election in November 2024, President Donald Trump announced that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, would head a newly created Department of Government Efficiency alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. It was boasted to be transformative, akin to the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons.

But Ramaswamy quit at the start in January, leaving the eccentric Musk alone in charge. He waved a chain saw on a public stage to proclaim deep cuts in the bureaucracy.

Last month, DOGE quietly shut down eight months before its charter was to expire. The results of this entity’s chaotic performance remain unclear. For the sake of future reform efforts and governance, policymakers and the public now need to learn in detail what if any impact DOGE had on “efficiency.”

Serious fiascos occurred. In February, hundreds ofly employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, were reportedly fired by DOGE (odd given the Manhattan Project comparison). Amid bipartisan alarms over safety, most were reinstated.

Musk’s software engineers were set loose in offices they clearly knew little about — with a shocking level of access to the private data of Americans. Their lack of government experience, common sense, and an undefined mission produced wildly inflated claims of savings. Some canceled contracts, notably in the unpopular demolition of the USAID program, were triple counted. By his controversial exit last spring, Musk’s claim he’d eliminate $2 trillion in purportedly wasteful U.S. spending withered to $1 trillion — and then, finally, to $150 billion. How much was reduced remains unclear.

Officials admit the DOGE cuts didn’t even slow the overall rate of federal spending in 2025. The Musk team did eliminate 271,000 public jobs in less than 10 months, or a 9% reduction — the largest-ever peacetime federal workforce cut. This contributed, among other things, to pushing the nation’s unemployment rate up to 4.6%.

DOGE’s worst legacy may well be its handling of private citizen information. Americans’ Social Security, medical and financial data seems to have gone unprotected and risks being shared across agencies. Any use of it for commercial or political purposes would likely have violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and other laws.

A recent report from the Social Security Administration’s former chief data officer found DOGE employees had unprecedented access to citizens’ private data “in a cloud environment without any verified security controls and without standard agency visibility into their use of that data.”

It is urgent that elected officials and monitors, from the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office, be mobilized in the new year to investigate and expose the facts and legality of DOGE’s actions. That’s a key job of the legislative branch. Otherwise the White House will have used this operation to dodge oversight.

The public has a right to know if DOGE indulged in the very fraud, waste and abuse it was supposed to correct. Without complete answers, that prospect seems distressingly possible.