The Department That Doesn't Exist
For ten months DOGE ruled by fear, metrics, and memes. The administrative state answered with law, inertia, and the calendar.
On January 2025, Elon Musk walked into the Executive Office of the President with a mandate to take a chainsaw to the federal government. A few weeks later, he literally waved a chainsaw around onstage at CPAC. His job was to dismantle the Deep State.
By November, the thing was already dead. Today’s Reuters story is just the obituary.
That doesn’t exist, said OPM Director Scott Kupor when asked about the Department of Government Efficiency. The entity that dominated headlines, terrorized federal workers, and promised to slash trillions? Gone. Absorbed back into the bureaucratic machinery it was supposed to destroy.
This is how the world’s richest man tried to run the U.S. government like a tech startup, and how the government simply outlasted him.
The Department of Government Efficiency was never actually a department. Creating a Cabinet-level agency takes an act of Congress, and Congress wasn’t handing Musk statutory authority.
So the administration just renamed the U.S. Digital Service, a small Obama-era unit, and stuffed Musk into it as a Special Government Employee.
No confirmation needed. His formal authority was limited. He was an unpaid advisor running a rebranded office, not a Senate-confirmed cabinet secretary with explicit budget powers.
He couldn’t unilaterally impound funds or cancel programs.
He was, on paper, just an advisor with a Twitter account and a God complex.
For ten months, DOGE turned the federal workforce into a hellscape of arbitrary purges and management-by-meme. Federal employees were told to list their accomplishments weekly or risk being treated as if they’d resigned. OPM later walked back the threat, but not before it triggered panic, fury, and mass exits.
Expertise doesn’t matter. You can be deleted like a line of bad code.
The absurdity peaked with Edward Coristine.
A 19-year-old programmer nicknamed Big Balls was given access to sensitive systems at State, DHS, USAID, and even CISA. No significant experience beyond a Neuralink internship.
A teenager with a cute nickname was poking around the State Department’s IT systems.
He’d already been fired from a cybersecurity internship after allegedly leaking internal data. Later reporting tied him to providing tech support for a cybercrime ring. He eventually got pushed out of DOGE too, after that history became public.
By then he’d already become the perfect mascot for the entire reckless enterprise.
By mid-year, DOGE claimed to have identified $214 billion in savings. It was plastered everywhere.
Then reporters checked the math.
NPR and others matched the claims against actual contract data. Verifiable savings? Roughly $2 billion. A rounding error. Less than one percent of what DOGE was bragging about.
It was fraud-adjacent accounting. They counted ceiling values of contracts as savings, triple-counted projects, claimed credit for expired deals. In one instance, a $119,000 cancellation was listed as a $150 million win.
Factor in the disruption costs (litigation, severance, stalled projects, the sheer paralysis across agencies) and the efficiency commission probably cost the government money.
The death blow didn’t come from bad math, though. It came from Trump.
When Trump pushed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act with trillions in new spending and new debt, Musk balked. He called it a disgusting abomination that would bankrupt America. It also happened to repeal EV tax credits, hurting Tesla.
This was a declaration of war.
I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.
Musk’s 130-day term as a special government employee expired in May. He walked.
The alliance collapsed into mutual hostility. Musk threatened a new political party. Trump threatened to cut SpaceX contracts.
And without its celebrity figurehead, DOGE had no reason to exist.
Staffers who had been sleeping in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building packed their bags.
The functions got absorbed by the very agencies Musk tried to disrupt. The ultimate bureaucratic irony. The Deep State didn’t fight back with a conspiracy. It just waited. Cited procedure, filed lawsuits, ran out the clock.
DOGE was a vanity project dressed up as reform. Minimal legal authority, opaque accounting, no coherent methodology.
The federal workforce survived, but it’s scarred. Over 200,000 people left through firings, buyouts, or voluntary resignations under extreme pressure. Critical teams at the Social Security Administration, the VA, and other agencies were gutted.
The brain drain will take years to reverse.
And for what?
A couple of billion in cleanly documented savings while the deficit exploded anyway.
The federal government is big because Americans want it big. They want Social Security checks, food safety inspections, border security. All of that requires people.
The checks and balances that frustrate CEOs aren’t obstacles. They are the job.
Breaking things means veterans don’t get benefits. It means disabled people sit on hold for six hours. It means a database outage instead of a retirement check.
But the fantasy persists.
The idea that a genius can swoop in and fix it all without understanding how any of it works is bipartisan catnip.
Now there’s a live-fire case study of what happens when a terminally online billionaire gets the keys. He breaks things, pisses off the President, and leaves before the bill comes due.
Musk learned that democracy isn’t a product to iterate on. Can’t patch it with a software update. Definitely can’t run it from a phone.
The chainsaw went back in the garage. The government, battered but intact, kept grinding forward.
Turns out disruption is expensive. And in the end, mostly pointless.