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DOGE “cut muscle, not fat”; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts

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Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.

Billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), holds a chainsaw as he speaks at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Credit: SAUL LOEB / Contributor | AFP

After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”

Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.

As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.

Under Musk, DOGE was hyped as planning to save the government a trillion dollars. On X, Musk bragged frequently about the agency, posting in February that DOGE was “the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this.”

The reality fell far short of Musk’s goals, with DOGE ultimately reporting it saved $214 billion—an amount that may be overstated by nearly 40 percent, critics warned earlier this year.

How much talent was lost due to DOGE cuts?

Once Musk left, confidence in DOGE waned as lawsuits over suspected illegal firings piled up. By June, Congress was drawn, largely down party lines, on whether to codify the “DOGE process”—rapidly firing employees, then quickly hiring back whoever was needed—or declare DOGE a failure—perhaps costing taxpayers more in the long term due to lost talent and services.

Because DOGE operated largely in secrecy, it may be months or even years before the public can assess the true cost of DOGE’s impact. However, in the absence of a government tracker, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, Elaine Kamarck, put together what might be the best status report showing how badly DOGE rocked government agencies.

In June, Kamarck joined other critics flagging DOGE’s reported savings as “bogus.” In the days before DOGE’s abrupt ending was announced, she published a report grappling with a critical question many have pondered since DOGE launched: “How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes?”

In the report, Kamarck charted “26,511 occasions where the Trump administration abruptly fired people and then hired them back.” She concluded that “a quick review of the reversals makes clear that the negative stereotype of the ‘paper-pushing bureaucrat’” that DOGE was supposedly targeting “is largely inaccurate.”

Instead, many of the positions the government rehired were “engineers, doctors, and other professionals whose work is critical to national security and public health,” Kamarck reported.

About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.” However, in about a quarter of cases, the government moved to rehire staffers before the court could weigh in, Kamarck reported. That seemed to be “a tacit admission that the blanket firings that took place during the DOGE era placed the federal government in danger of not being able to accomplish some of its most important missions,” she said.

Perhaps the biggest downside of all of DOGE’s hasty downsizing, though, is a trend in which many long-time government workers simply decided to leave or retire, rather than wait for DOGE to eliminate their roles.

During the first six months of Trump’s term, 154,000 federal employees signed up for the deferred resignation program, Reuters reported, while more than 70,000 retired. Both numbers were clear increases (tens of thousands) over exits from government in prior years, Kamarck’s report noted.

“A lot of people said, ‘the hell with this’ and left,” Kamarck told Ars.

Kamarck told Ars that her report makes it obvious that DOGE “cut muscle, not fat,” because “they didn’t really know what they were doing.”

As a result, agencies are now scrambling to assess the damage and rehire lost talent. However, her report documented that agencies aligned with Trump’s policies appear to have an easier time getting new hires approved, despite Kupor telling Reuters that the government-wide hiring freeze is “over.” As of mid-November 2025, “of the over 73,000 posted jobs, a candidate was selected for only about 14,400 of them,” Kamarck reported, noting that it was impossible to confirm how many selected candidates have officially started working.

“Agencies are having to do a lot of reassessments in terms of what happened,” Kamarck told Ars, concluding that DOGE “was basically a disaster.”

A decentralized DOGE may be more powerful

“DOGE is not dead,” though, Kamarck said, noting that “the cutting effort is definitely” continuing under the Office of Management and Budget, which “has a lot more power than DOGE ever had.”

However, the termination of DOGE does mean that “the way it operated is dead,” and that will likely come as a relief to government workers who expected DOGE to continue slashing agencies through July 2026 at least, if not beyond.

Many government workers are still fighting terminations, as court cases drag on, and even Kamarck has given up on tracking due to inconsistencies in outcomes.

“It’s still like one day the court says, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Kamarck explained. “Then the next day another court says, ‘Yes, you can.’” Other times, the courts “change their minds,” or the Trump administration just doesn’t “listen to the courts, which is fairly terrifying,” Kamarck said.

Americans likely won’t get a clear picture of DOGE’s impact until power shifts in Washington. That could mean waiting for the next presidential election, or possibly if Democrats win a majority in midterm elections, DOGE investigations could start as early as 2027, Kamarck suggested.

OMB will likely continue with cuts that Americans appear to want, as White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Reuters that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment.”

However, Kamarck’s report noted polls showing that most Americans disapprove of how Trump is managing government and its workforce, perhaps indicating that OMB will be pressured to slow down and avoid roiling public opinion ahead of the midterms.

“The fact that ordinary Americans have come to question the downsizing is, most likely, the result of its rapid unfolding, with large cuts done quickly regardless of their impact on the government’s functioning,” Kamarck suggested. Even Musk began to question DOGE. After Trump announced plans to appeal an electrical vehicle mandate that the Tesla founder relied on, Musk posted on X, “What the heck was the point of DOGE, if he’s just going to increase the debt by $5 trillion??”

Facing “blowback” over the most unpopular cuts, agencies sometimes rehired cut staffers within 24 hours, Kamarck noted, pointing to the Department of Energy as one of the “most dramatic” earliest examples. In that case, Americans were alarmed to see engineers cut who were responsible for keeping the nation’s nuclear arsenal “safe and ready.” Retention for those posts was already a challenge due to “high demand in the private sector,” and the number of engineers was considered “too low” ahead of DOGE’s cuts. Everyone was reinstated within a day, Kamarck reported.

Alarm bells rang across the federal government, and it wasn’t just about doctors and engineers being cut or entire agencies being dismantled, like USAID. Even staffers DOGE viewed as having seemingly less critical duties—like travel bookers and customer service reps—were proven key to government functioning. Arbitrary cuts risked hurting Americans in myriad ways, hitting their pocketbooks, throttling community services, and limiting disease and disaster responses, Kamarck documented.

Now that the hiring freeze is lifted and OMB will be managing DOGE-like cuts moving forward, Kamarck suggested that Trump will face ongoing scrutiny over Musk’s controversial agency, despite its dissolution.

“In order to prove that the downsizing was worth the pain, the Trump administration will have to show that the government is still operating effectively,” Kamarck wrote. “But much could go wrong,” she reported, spouting a list of nightmare scenarios:

“Nuclear mismanagement or airline accidents would be catastrophic. Late disaster warnings from agencies monitoring weather patterns, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and inadequate responses from bodies such as the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), could put people in danger. Inadequate staffing at the FBI could result in counter-terrorism failures. Reductions in vaccine uptake could lead to the resurgence of diseases such as polio and measles. Inadequate funding and staffing for research could cause scientists to move their talents abroad. Social Security databases could be compromised, throwing millions into chaos as they seek to prove their earnings records, and persistent customer service problems will reverberate through the senior and disability communities.”

The good news is that federal agencies recovering from DOGE cuts are “aware of the time bombs and trying to fix them,” Kamarck told Ars. But with so much brain drain from DOGE’s first six months ripping so many agencies apart at their seams, the government may struggle to provide key services until lost talent can be effectively replaced, she said.

“I don’t know how quickly they can put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Kamarck said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

DOGE “cut muscle, not fat”; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts Read More »

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Musk’s X posts on ketamine, Putin spur release of his security clearances

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“A disclosure, even with redactions, will reveal whether a security clearance was granted with or without conditions or a waiver,” DCSA argued.

Ultimately, DCSA failed to prove that Musk risked “embarrassment or humiliation” not only if the public learned what specific conditions or waivers applied to Musk’s clearances but also if there were any conditions or waivers at all, Cote wrote.

Three cases that DCSA cited to support this position—including a case where victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking scheme had a substantial privacy interest in non-disclosure of detailed records—do not support the government’s logic, Cote said. The judge explained that the disclosures would not have affected the privacy rights of any third parties, emphasizing that “Musk’s diminished privacy interest is underscored by the limited information plaintiffs sought in their FOIA request.”

Musk’s X posts discussing his occasional use of prescription ketamine and his disclosure on a podcast that smoking marijuana prompted NASA requirements for random drug testing, Cote wrote, “only enhance” the public’s interest in how Musk’s security clearances were vetted. Additionally, Musk has posted about speaking with Vladimir Putin, prompting substantial public interest in how his foreign contacts may or may not restrict his security clearances. More than 2 million people viewed Musk’s X posts on these subjects, the judge wrote, noting that:

It is undisputed that drug use and foreign contacts are two factors DCSA considers when determining whether to impose conditions or waivers on a security clearance grant. DCSA fails to explain why, given Musk’s own, extensive disclosures, the mere disclosure that a condition or waiver exists (or that no condition or waiver exists) would subject him to ’embarrassment or humiliation.’

Rather, for the public, “the list of Musk’s security clearances, including any conditions or waivers, could provide meaningful insight into DCSA’s performance of that duty and responses to Musk’s admissions, if any,” Cote wrote.

In a footnote, Cote said that this substantial public interest existed before Musk became a special government employee, ruling that DCSA was wrong to block the disclosures seeking information on Musk as a major government contractor. Her ruling likely paves the way for the NYT or other news organizations to submit FOIA requests for a list of Musk’s clearances while he helmed DOGE.

It’s not immediately clear when the NYT will receive the list they requested in 2024, but the government has until October 17 to request redactions before it’s publicized.

“The Times brought this case because the public has a right to know about how the government conducts itself,” Charlie Stadtlander, an NYT spokesperson, said. “The decision reaffirms that fundamental principle and we look forward to receiving the document at issue.”

Musk’s X posts on ketamine, Putin spur release of his security clearances Read More »

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Senate staff probes DOGE, finds locked doors and windows covered with trash bags

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Pay no attention to the DOGE behind the curtain

Democratic report describes Social Security risk and secretive DOGE offices.

A protest against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk in New York on February 19, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press

Multiple whistleblowers alleged that DOGE uploaded a highly sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) database to an unmonitored cloud environment, according to a report by Senate Democratic staff. The staff report describes an investigation into DOGE activities at three agencies, including a site visit at the General Services Administration (GSA) in which DOGE officials appeared to be hiding certain areas from view.

As we reported last month, then-SSA Chief Data Officer Chuck Borges alleged that DOGE officials created “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment that circumvents oversight.” At least one other whistleblower has apparently made the same allegation.

Whistleblowers, including Borges, alleged “that Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old DOGE staffer who was previously fired from a job for leaking company data to a competitor, and other DOGE personnel had been granted permission to move highly sensitive SSA data into an unmonitored cloud environment,” the Senate Democratic report said. “The whistleblowers said that DOGE has uploaded a live copy of NUMIDENT, which contains highly sensitive personal data on anyone who has held a Social Security number, including every American. This includes Social Security numbers (SSNs), place and date of birth, work permit status, and parents’ names, among other sensitive personal information, for all Americans, to a cloud environment.”

SSA Chief Information Officers Michael Russo and Aram Moghaddassi, who are described as “DOGE-affiliated,” allegedly “granted approval for the data move despite a June 12, 2025, internal risk assessment flagging a high level of risk and potentially catastrophic impact to SSA beneficiaries and SSA programs absent additional controls to safeguard against unauthorized access,” the report said.

That internal risk assessment by SSA employees “evaluated the likelihood of such catastrophic impact to be between 35 and 65 percent,” with the potential for widespread disclosure of personally identifiable information, the report said.

Windows “hastily covered with black trash bags and tape”

Democratic staffers investigated DOGE activities at the SSA, GSA, and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), resulting in the report written by staff for Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. The report criticized the agencies for lack of cooperation.

“None of the agencies have allowed meetings with representatives from agency DOGE teams. In the DOGE spaces staff were permitted to view, armed guards controlled access to work and living spaces, rooms were locked, and office windows appeared to have been hastily covered with black trash bags and tape,” the report said.

At the GSA building, “officials refused to show staff at least six offices that GSA had allowed DOGE to convert into bedrooms,” and refused to show staff the agency’s Starlink broadband equipment, the report said. In another instance described by the report, “GSA officials said they did not have the key to open a locked room that had windows covered with black paper, trash bags, and tape. When staff asked why the most senior officials in offices charged with building management and security could not open an office door, GSA could not provide an answer.”

The report said that during a site visit at the SSA building, the DOGE workspace was guarded by armed security. “SSA officials providing the tour confirmed that this level of security was unusual,” the report said. “When staff asked why the additional security for the DOGE workspace was needed, Mr. [Dan] Callahan [the Assistant Commissioner for Building and Facilities Management] said that DOGE staff were concerned about threats to their safety. Staff asked whether these were direct threats and whether officials informed law enforcement. Officials explained that there had not been a specific threat, rather that some DOGE staff felt threatened based on a communication with an SSA employee that ‘included cursing.'”

Aside from the security guard, the DOGE offices appeared to be empty on a Thursday afternoon, the report said. Senate staff were told “that DOGE staff had telework agreements with the agency. SSA officials confirmed that DOGE were the only individuals who had this approved telework structure in the entire CIO’s office. SSA officials could not answer questions about the telework agreements, including a reason for the telework exception and who approved the agreements.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, said that “DOGE isn’t making government more efficient—it’s putting Americans’ sensitive information in the hands of completely unqualified and untrustworthy individuals. They are bypassing cybersecurity protections, evading oversight, and putting Americans’ personal data at risk.”

Agencies didn’t answer many questions, report says

SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano previously denied the whistleblower allegations in a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). The cloud environment “is actually a secured server in the agency’s cloud infrastructure which historically has housed this data and is continuously monitored and overseen—SSA’s standard practice,” the letter said.

The Senate Democratic staff report said the agencies did not answer many of the questions posed during the investigation:

In response to these questions, senior officials at SSA, GSA, and OPM all failed to provide information about who was in charge; what conduct DOGE teams were engaged in; and what data those teams had been given access to, including the authorities and restrictions guiding their access. None of the agencies could answer simple questions about organizational charts and employee roles. During oversight trips, GSA and OPM would not even directly acknowledge the existence of their DOGE teams—despite the fact that Executive Order 14158 requires each agency to have a DOGE team comprised of at least four people. At the OPM site visit, officials provided staff with information that directly contradicted court documents filed on the agency’s behalf… None of the agencies have responded to staff’s follow-up questions, including whether they are in compliance with federal law.

The Senate staff report said that OPM’s “political leadership were determined to deny any existence of DOGE at the agency,” despite evidence to the contrary. When staff visited OPM, offices were mostly empty and “leadership had difficulty answering a series of basic questions about the agency’s organization and staffing,” the report said.

When contacted by Ars today, the SSA did not provide any new response to the Senate staff report but instead pointed us to the Bisignano letter that we wrote about last week.

“I can confirm, based on the agency’s thorough review, that neither the Numident database nor any of its data has been accessed, leaked, hacked, or shared in any unauthorized fashion,” Bisignano wrote in the letter. “SSA continuously monitors its systems for any signs of unauthorized access or data compromise, and we have not detected any such incidents involving the Numident database.”

An OPM spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars today, “OPM takes its responsibility to safeguard federal personnel records seriously. This report recycles unfounded claims about so-called ‘DOGE teams’ that simply have never existed at OPM. Federal employees at OPM conduct their work in line with longstanding law, security, and compliance requirements. Instead of rehashing baseless allegations, Senate Democrats should focus their efforts on the real challenges facing the federal workforce. OPM remains committed to transparency, accountability, and delivering for the American people.”

We contacted the GSA today and will update this article if it provides a response.

Report warns adversaries could hack database

While there’s no reported breach, the Senate Democratic report warned that the SSA’s cloud environment could be hacked by foreign adversaries, including “Russia, China, and Iran, who regularly attempt cyber attacks on the US government and critical infrastructure.”

The report urged the Trump administration to “immediately shut down the new cloud environment at SSA that contains NUMIDENT data,” and take other actions such as revoking DOGE access to personal data “until agencies certify that all agency personnel are in compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the Privacy Act, the Federal Records Act.” But Democrats’ ability to influence the administration is limited at best, particularly with Republicans holding majorities in both the House and Senate.

DOGE sought access to Social Security data as part of an effort to uncover evidence of fraud. A federal judge wrote in March that DOGE “is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” In June, the Supreme Court allowed DOGE to access SSA records, overturning lower-court decisions that imposed some limits on data access.

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Senate staff probes DOGE, finds locked doors and windows covered with trash bags Read More »

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Deeply divided Supreme Court lets NIH grant terminations continue

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The dissents

The primary dissent was written by Chief Justice Roberts, and joined in part by the three Democratic appointees, Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor. It is a grand total of one paragraph and can be distilled down to a single sentence: “If the District Court had jurisdiction to vacate the directives, it also had jurisdiction to vacate the ‘Resulting Grant Terminations.’”

Jackson, however, chose to write a separate and far more detailed argument against the decision, mostly focusing on the fact that it’s not simply a matter of abstract law; it has real-world consequences.

She notes that existing law prevents plaintiffs from suing in the Court of Federal Claims while the facts are under dispute in other courts (something acknowledged by Barrett). That would mean that, as here, any plaintiffs would have to have the policy declared illegal first in the District Court, and only after that was fully resolved could they turn to the Federal Claims Court to try to restore their grants. That’s a process that could take years. In the meantime, the scientists would be out of funding, with dire consequences.

Yearslong studies will lose validity. Animal subjects will be euthanized. Life-saving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.

Jackson also had little interest in hearing that the government would be harmed by paying out the grants in the meantime. “For the Government, the incremental expenditure of money is at stake,” she wrote. “For the plaintiffs and the public, scientific progress itself hangs in the balance along with the lives that progress saves.”

With this decision, of course, it no longer hangs in the balance. There’s a possibility that the District Court’s ruling that the government’s policy was arbitrary and capricious will ultimately prevail; it’s not clear, because Barrett says she hasn’t even seen the government make arguments there, and Roberts only wrote regarding the venue issues. In the meantime, even with the policy stayed, it’s unlikely that anyone will focus grant proposals on the disfavored subjects, given that the policy might be reinstated at any moment.

And even if that ruling is upheld, it will likely take years to get there, and only then could a separate case be started to restore the funding. Any labs that had been using those grants will have long since moved on, and the people working on those projects scattered.

Deeply divided Supreme Court lets NIH grant terminations continue Read More »

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Whistleblower scientists outline Trump’s plan to politicize and dismantle NSF

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Nearly 150 employees of the National Science Foundation (NSF) sent an urgent letter of dissent to Congress on Tuesday, warning that the Trump administration’s recent “politically motivated and legally questionable” actions threaten to dismantle the independent “world-renowned scientific agency.”

Most NSF employees signed the letter anonymously, with only Jesus Soriano, the president of their local union (AFGE Local 3403), publicly disclosing his name. Addressed to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, the letter insisted that Congress intervene to stop steep budget cuts, mass firings and grant terminations, withholding of billions in appropriated funds, allegedly coerced resignations, and the sudden eviction of NSF from its headquarters planned for next year.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the letter revealed “a covert and ideologically driven secondary review process by unqualified political appointees” that is now allegedly “interfering with the scientific merit-based review system” that historically has made NSF a leading, trusted science agency. Soriano further warned that “scientists, program officers, and staff” have all “been targeted for doing their jobs with integrity” in what the letter warned was “a broader agenda to dismantle institutional safeguards, impose demagoguery in research funding decisions, and undermine science.”

At a press conference with Lofgren on Wednesday, AFGE National President Everett Kelley backed NSF workers and reminded Congress that their oversight of the executive branch “is not optional.”

Taking up the fight, Lofgren promised to do “all” that she “can” to protect the agency and the entire US scientific enterprise.

She also promised to protect Soriano from any retaliation, as some federal workers, including NSF workers, alleged they’ve already faced retaliation, necessitating their anonymity to speak publicly. Lofgren criticized the “deep shame” of the Trump administration creating a culture of fear permeating NSF, noting that the “horrifying” statements in the letter are “all true,” yet filed as a whistleblower complaint as if they’re sharing secrets.

Whistleblower scientists outline Trump’s plan to politicize and dismantle NSF Read More »

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Is DOGE doomed to fail? Some experts are ready to call it.

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Trump wants $45M to continue DOGE’s work. Critics warn costs already too high.

Federal workers and protestors spoke out against US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their push to gut federal services and impose mass layoffs earlier this year. Credit: Pacific Press / Contributor | LightRocket

Critics are increasingly branding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a failure, including lawmakers fiercely debating how much funding to allot next year to the controversial agency.

On Tuesday, Republicans and Democrats sparred over DOGE’s future at a DOGE subcommittee hearing, according to NextGov, a news site for federal IT workers. On one side, Republicans sought to “lock in” and codify the “DOGE process” for supposedly reducing waste and fraud in government, and on the other, Democrats argued that DOGE has “done the opposite” of its intended mission and harmed Americans in the process.

DOGE has “led to poor services, a brain drain on our federal government, and it’s going to cost taxpayers money long term,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) argued.

For now, DOGE remains a temporary government agency that could sunset as soon as July 4, 2026. Under Musk’s leadership, it was supposed to save the US government a trillion dollars. But so far, DOGE only reports saving about $180 billion—and doubt has been cast on DOGE’s math ever since reports revealed that nearly 40 percent of the savings listed on the DOGE site were “bogus,” Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institute, wrote in a report detailing DOGE’s exposed failures.

The “DOGE process” that Republicans want to codify, Kamarck explained, typically begins with rushed mass layoffs. That’s soon followed by offers for buyouts or deferred resignations, before the government eventually realizes it’s lost critical expertise and starts scrambling to rehire workers or rescind buyout offers after “it becomes apparent” that a heavily gutted agency “is in danger of malfunctioning.”

Kamarck warned that DOGE appeared to be using the firings of federal workers to test the “unitary executive” theory, “popular among conservatives,” that argues that “the president has more power than Congress.” Consider how DOGE works to shut down agencies funded by Congress without seeking lawmakers’ approval by simply removing critical workers key to operations, Kamarck suggested, like DOGE did early on at the National Science Foundation.

Democrats’ witness at the DOGE hearing—Emily DiVito of the economic policy think tank Groundwork Collaborative—suggested that extensive customer service problems at the Social Security Administration was just one powerful example of DOGE’s negative impacts affecting Americans today.

Some experts expect the damage of DOGE’s first few months could ripple across Trump’s entire term. “The rapid rehirings are a warning sign” that the government “has lost more capacities and expertise that could prove critical—and difficult to replace—in the months and years ahead,” experts told CNN.

By codifying the DOGE process, as Republicans wish to do, the government would seemingly only perpetuate this pattern, which could continue to be disastrous for Americans relying on government programs.

“There are time bombs all over the place in the federal government because of this,” Kamarck told CNN. “They’ve wreaked havoc across nearly every agency.”

DOGE spikes costs for Americans, nonprofit warns

Citizens for Ethics, a nonpartisan nonprofit striving to end government secrecy, estimated this week that DOGE cuts at just a few agencies “could result in a loss of over $10 billion in US-based economic activity.”

The shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alone—which Musk allegedly stands to personally benefit from—likely robbed American taxpayers of even more. The nonprofit noted that agency clawed back “over $26 billion in funds” from irresponsible businesses between 2011 and 2021 before its work was blocked.

Additionally, DOGE cuts at the Internal Revenue Service—which could “end or close audits of wealthy individuals and corporations” due to a lack of staffing—could cost the US an estimated $500 billion in dodged taxes, the nonprofit said. Partly due to conflicts like these, Kamarck suggested that when it finally comes time to assess DOGE’s success, the answer to both “did federal spending or the federal deficit shrink?” will “almost surely be no.”

As society attempts to predict the full extent of DOGE’s potential harms, The Wall Street Journal spoke to university students who suggested that regulatory clarity could possibly straighten out DOGE’s efforts now that Musk is no longer pushing for mass firings. At the DOGE hearing, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) suggested the only way to ensure DOGE hits its trillion-dollar goal is to “make sure these cuts aren’t just temporary” and pass laws “to streamline agencies, eliminate redundant programs and give the president the authority to fire bureaucrats who don’t do their jobs.”

But one finance student, Troy Monte, suggested to WSJ that DOGE has already cost the Trump administration “stability, expertise, and public trust,” opining, “the cost of DOGE won’t be measured in dollars, but in damage.”

Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told CNN that when DOGE borrowed the tech industry tactic of moving fast and breaking things, then scrambling to fix what breaks, it exposed “the mosaic of incompetence and a failure on the part of this administration to understand the critical value that the breadth of government expertise provides.”

“This is not about a single incident,” Stier said. “It’s about a pattern that has implications for our government’s ability to meet not just the challenges of today but the critical challenges of tomorrow.”

DOGE’s future appears less certain without Musk

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) had hoped to subpoena Musk at the DOGE hearing to testify on DOGE’s agenda, but Republicans blocked her efforts, NextGov reported.

At the hearing, she alleged that “all of this talk about lowering costs and reducing waste is absolute BS. Their agenda is about one thing: making the federal government so weak that they can exploit it for their personal gain.”

Just yesterday, The Washington Post editorial board published an op-ed already declaring DOGE a failure. Former DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia told NPR that he expects DOGE will “fizzle out” purely because DOGE failed to uncover as much fraud as Musk and Trump had alleged was spiking government costs.

Beyond obvious criticism (loudly voiced at myriad DOGE protests), it’s easy to understand why this pessimistic view is catching on, since even from a cursory glance at DOGE’s website, the agency’s momentum appears to be slowing since Musk’s abrupt departure in late May. The DOGE site’s estimated savings are supposed to be updated weekly—and one day aspire to be updated in real-time—but the numbers apparently haven’t changed a cent since a few days after Musk shed his “special government employee” label. The site notes the last update was on June 3.

In addition to Musk, several notable Musk appointees have also left DOGE. Most recently, Wired reported that one of Musk’s first appointees—19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine—is gone, quitting just weeks after receiving full-time employee status granted around the same time that Musk left. Lavingia told Wired that he’d heard “a lot” of people Musk hired have been terminated since his exit.

Rather than rely on a specific engineer spearheading DOGE initiatives across government, like Coristine appeared positioned to become in Musk’s absence, Trump cabinet members or individual agency heads may have more say over DOGE cuts in the future, Kamarck and Politico’s E&E News reported.

“The result so far is that post-Musk, DOGE is morphing into an agency-by-agency effort—no longer run by a central executive branch office, but by DOGE recruits who have been embedded in the agencies and by political appointees, such as cabinet secretaries, who are committed to the same objectives,” Kamarck wrote.

Whether Trump’s appointees can manage DOGE without Musk’s help or his appointees remains to be seen, as DOGE continues to seek new hires. While Musk’s appointed DOGE staff was heavily criticized from day one, Kamarck noted that at least Musk’s appointees appeared “to have a great deal of IT talent, something the federal government has been lacking since the beginning of the information age.”

Trump can extend the timeline for when DOGE sunsets, NextGov noted, and DOGE still has $22 million left over from this year to keep pursuing its goals, as lawmakers debate whether $45 million in funding is warranted.

Despite Trump and Musk’s very public recent fallout, White House spokesperson Kush Desai has said that Trump remains committed to fulfilling DOGE’s mission, but NPR noted his statement curiously didn’t mention DOGE by name.

“President Trump pledged to make our bloated government more efficient by slashing waste, fraud, and abuse. The administration is committed to delivering on this mandate while rectifying any oversights to minimize disruptions to critical government services,” Desai said.

Currently, there are several court-ordered reviews looking into exactly which government systems DOGE accessed, which could reveal more than what’s currently known about how much success—or failure—DOGE has had. Those reviews could expose how much training DOGE workers had before they were granted security clearances to access sensitive information, potentially spawning more backlash as DOGE’s work lurches forward.

Kamarck suggested that DOGE was “doomed to face early failures” because its “efforts were enacted on dubious legal grounds”—a fact that still seems to threaten the agency’s “permanence.” But if the next incoming president conducts an evaluation in 2029 and finds that DOGE’s efforts have not meaningfully reduced the size or spending of government, DOGE could possibly disappear. Former staffers hope that even more rehiring may resume if it does, E&E reported.

In the meantime, Americans relying on government programs must contend with the risk that they could lose assistance in the moments they need it most as long as the Musk-created “DOGE process” continues to be followed.

“Which one of these malfunctions will blow up first is anyone’s guess, but FEMA’s lack of preparedness for hurricane season is a good candidate,” Kamarck said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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How Tesla Takedown got its start

Cars, doge, elon musk, syndication, Tesla / /

America’s most vulnerable Billionaire?

It’s an unlikely coalition that’s been hyping Tesla’s stock slide since its launch.

On a sunny April afternoon in Seattle, around 40 activists gathered at the Pine Box, a beer and pizza bar in the sometimes scruffy Capitol Hill neighborhood. The group had reserved a side room attached to the outside patio; before remarks began, attendees flowed in and out, enjoying the warm day. Someone set up a sound system. Then the activists settled in, straining their ears as the streamed call crackled through less-than-perfect speakers.

In more than a decade of climate organizing, it was the first time Emily Johnston, one of the group’s leaders, had attended a happy hour to listen to a company’s quarterly earnings call. Also the first time a local TV station showed up to cover such a happy hour. “This whole campaign has been just a magnet for attention,” she says.

The group, officially called the Troublemakers, was rewarded right away. TeslaCEO Elon Musk started the investors’ call for the first quarter of 2025 with a sideways acknowledgement of exactly the work the group had been doing for the past two months. He called out the nationwide backlash to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an effort to cut government spending staffed by young tech enthusiasts and Musk company alumni, named—with typical Muskian Internet-brained flourish—for an early 2010s meme.

“Now, the protests you’ll see out there, they’re very organized, they’re paid for,” Musk told listeners. For weeks, thousands of people—including the Troublemakers—had camped outside Tesla showrooms, service centers, and charging stations. Musk suggested that not only were they paid for their time, they were only interested in his work because they had once received “wasteful largesse” from the federal government. Musk had presented the theory and sharpened it on his social media platform X for weeks. Now, he argued, the protesters were off the dole—and furious.

Musk offered no proof of his assertions; to a person, every protester who spoke to WIRED insisted that they are not being paid and are exactly what they appear to be: people who are angry at Elon Musk. They call their movement the “Tesla Takedown.”

Before Musk got on the call to speak to investors, Tesla, which arguably kicked off a now multitrillion-dollar effort to transition global autos to electricity, had presented them with one of the company’s worst quarterly financial reports in years. Net income was down 71 percent year over year; revenue fell more than $2 billion short of Wall Street’s expectations.

Now, in Seattle, just the first few minutes of Musk’s remarks left the partygoers, many veterans of the climate movement, giddy. Someone close to the staticky speakers repeated the best parts to the small crowd: “I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said. Under a spinning disco ball, people whooped and clapped. Someone held up a snapshot of Tesla’s stock performance over the past year, a jagged but falling black line.

“If you ever wanted to know that protest matters, here’s your proof,” Johnston recalled weeks later.

The Tesla Takedown, an effort to hit back at Musk and his wealth where it hurts, seems to have appeared at just the right time. Tesla skeptics have argued for years that the company, which has the highest market capitalization of any automaker, is overvalued. They contend that the company’s CEO has been able to distract from flawed fundamentals—an aging vehicle lineup, a Cybertruck sales flop, the much-delayed introduction of self-driving technology—with bluster and showmanship.

Musk’s interest in politics, which kicked into a new and more expensive gear when he went all in for Donald Trump during the 2024 election, was always going to invite more scrutiny for his business empire. But the grassroots movement, which began as a post on Bluesky, has become a boisterous, ragtag, and visible locus of, sorry to use the word, resistance against Musk and Trump. It’s hard to pin market moves on any one thing, but Tesla’s stock price is down some 33 percent since its end-of-2024 high.

Tesla Takedown points to a uniquely screwed-up moment in American politics. Down is up; up is down. A man who made a fortune sounding the alarm about the evils of the fossil fuel industry joined with it to spend hundreds of millions in support of a right-wing presidential candidate and became embedded in an administration with a slash-and-burn approach to environmental regulation. (This isn’t good for electric cars.) The same guy, once extolled as the real-life Tony Stark—he made a cameo in Iron Man 2!—has become for some a real-life comic book villain, his skulduggery enough to bring together a coalition of climate activists, freaked-out and laid-off federal workers, immigrant rights champions, union groups, PhDs deeply concerned about the future of American science, Ukraine partisans, liberal retirees sick of watching cable news, progressive parents hoping to show their kids how to stick up for their values, LGBTQ+ rights advocates, despondent veterans, and car and tech nerds who have been crying foul on Musk’s fantastical technology claims for years now.

To meet the moment, then, the Takedown uses a unique form of protest logic: Boycott and protest the electric car company not because the movement disagrees with its logic or mission—quite the opposite, even!—but because it might be the only way to materially affect the unelected, un-beholden-to-the-public guy at its head. And then hope the oft-irrational stock market catches on.

So for weeks, across cities like New York; Berkeley and Palo Alto, California; Meridian, Idaho; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; South Salt Lake, Utah; and Austin, Texas, the thousands of people who make up the Takedown movement have been stationed outside of Tesla showrooms, making it a little bit uncomfortable to test drive one of Musk’s electric rides, or even just drive past in one.

Change in the air

When Shua Sanchez graduated from college in 2013, there was about a week, he remembers, when he was convinced that the most important thing he could do was work for Tesla. He had a degree in physics; he knew all about climate change and what was at stake. He felt called to causes, had been protesting since George W. Bush invaded Iraq when he was in middle school. Maybe his life’s work would be helping the world’s premier electric carmaker convince drivers that there was a cleaner and more beautiful life after fossil fuel.

In the end, though, Sanchez opted for a doctorate program focusing on the quantum properties of super-conducting and magnetic materials. (“I shoot frozen magnets with lasers all day,” he jokes.) So he felt thankful for his choice a few years later when he read media reports about Tesla’s efforts to tamp down unionizing efforts at its factories. He felt more thankful when, in 2017, Musk signed on to two of Trump’s presidential advisory councils. (The CEO publicly departed them months later, after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.) Even more thankful in 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter with the near-express purpose of opening it up to extreme right-wing speech. More thankful still by the summer of 2024, after Musk officially endorsed Trump’s presidential bid.

By the time Musk appeared onstage at a rally following Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and threw out what appeared to be a Nazi salute—Musk has denied that was what it was—Sanchez, now in a postdoctorate fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was ready to do something about it besides not taking a job at Tesla. A few days later, as reports of DOGE’s work began to leak out of Washington, a friend sent him a February 8 Bluesky post from a Boston-based disinformation scholar named Joan Donovan.

“If Musk thinks he can speed run through DC downloading personal data, we can certainly bang some pots and pans on the sidewalks in front of Tesla dealerships,” Donovan posted on the platform, already an online refuge for those looking for an alternative to Musk’s X. “Bring your friends and make a little noise. Organize locally, act globally.” She added a link to a list of Tesla locations, and a GIF of the Swedish Chef playing the drums on some vegetables with wooden spoons. Crucially, she appended the hashtag #TeslaTakeover. Later, the Internet would coalesce around a different rallying cry: #TeslaTakedown.

Baltimore-area residents protest the Trump administration and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a Tesla car dealership as part of a boycott of Tesla vehicles. Saturday, March 29, 2025.

Credit: Dominic Gwinn/Getty

Baltimore-area residents protest the Trump administration and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a Tesla car dealership as part of a boycott of Tesla vehicles. Saturday, March 29, 2025. Credit: Dominic Gwinn/Getty

The post did not go viral. To date, it has only 175 likes. But it did catch the attention of actor and filmmaker Alex Winter. Winter shot to prominence in 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—he was Bill—and has more recently produced multiple documentaries focusing on online culture, piracy, and the power of social media. He and Donovan had bonded a few years earlier over activism and punk rock, and the actor, who has a larger social media following, asked the scholar if he could create a website to centralize the burgeoning movement. “I do think we’re at a point where people need to stick their necks up out of the foxhole en masse, or we’re simply not going to get through,” he tells WIRED. In the website’s first 12 hours of existence, he says, thousands of people registered to take part in the Takedown.

Donovan’s Bluesky post brought Sanchez to the Boston Back Bay Tesla showroom on Boylston Street the next Saturday, where 30 people had gathered with signs. For Sanchez, the whole thing felt personal. “Elon Musk started a PhD at Stanford in my field. He quit after two days and then went and became a tech bro, but he presents that he’s one of us,” he says. With Musk’s new visibility—and plans to slash government research dollars while promoting right-wing ideology—Sanchez was ready to push back.

Sanchez has been outside the showroom during weekly protests throughout the Boston winter, megaphone in hand, leading chants: “It ain’t fun. It ain’t funny. Elon Musk is stealing your money.” “We don’t want your Nazi cars. Take a one-way trip to Mars.”

“We make it fun, so a lot of people come back,” Sanchez says. Someone slapped Musk’s face on one of the inflatable tube guys you often see outside of car dealerships; he whipped around at several protests. A popular bubble-themed routine—“Tesla is a bubble”—saw protesters toss around a giant, transparent ball as others blew bubbles around it. Then the ball popped, loudly, during a protest—a sign? At some of Boston’s biggest actions, hundreds of people have shown up to demonstrate against Tesla, Musk, and Trump, Sanchez says.

Donovan envisioned the protests as potent visible responses to Musk’s slashing of government programs and jobs. But she also knew that social movements are a critical release valve in times of upheaval. “People need to relieve the pressure that they feel when the government is not doing the right thing,” she tells WIRED. “If you let that pressure build up too much, obviously it can turn very dangerous.”

In some ways, she’s right. In at least four incidents across four states, people have been charged by the federal government with various crimes including defacing, shooting at, throwing Molotov cocktails toward, and setting fire to Tesla showrooms and charging stations. In a move that has worried civil liberties experts, the Trump administration has treated these attacks against the president’s richest backer’s car company as “domestic terrorism,” granting federal authorities greater latitude and resources to track down alleged perpetrators and threatening them with up to 20 years in prison.

In posts on X and in public appearances, Musk and other federal officials have seemed to conflate the actions of a few allegedly violent people with the wider protests against Tesla, implying that both are funded by shadowy “generals.” “Firing bullets into showrooms and burning down cars is unacceptable,” Musk said at an event last month in which he appeared remotely on video, his face looming over the stage. “Those people will go to prison, and the people that funded them and organized them will also go to prison. Don’t worry.” He looked into the camera and pointed his finger at the audience. “We’re coming for you.”

Tesla Takedown participants and leaders have repeatedly said that the movement is nonviolent. “Authoritarian regimes have a long history of equating peaceful protest with violence. The #TeslaTakedown movement has always been and will remain nonviolent,” Dallas volunteer Stephanie Frizzell wrote in an email. What violence has occurred at protests themselves seems limited to on-site spats that mostly target protesters.

Donovan herself skipped some protests after receiving death threats and hearing a rumor that she was on a government list targeting disinformation researchers. On X, prominent right-wing accounts harassed her and other Takedown leaders; she says people have contacted her colleagues to try to get her fired.

Then, on the afternoon of March 6, Boston University ecology professor Nathan Phillips was in his office on campus when he received a panicked message from his wife. She said that two people claiming to represent the FBI visited their home. “I was just stunned,” Phillips says. “We both had a feeling of disbelief, that this must be some kind of hoax or a joke or something like that.”

Phillips had attended a Tesla Takedown event weeks earlier, but he wasn’t sure whether the visit was related to the protests or his previous climate activism. So after sitting shocked in his office for an hour, he called his local FBI field office. Someone picked up and asked for his information, he remembers, and then asked why he was calling. Phillips explained what had happened. “They just abruptly hung up on me,” he says.

Phillips never had additional contact from the FBI, but he knows of at least five other climate activists who were visited by men claiming to be from the agency on March 6.

The FBI tells WIRED that it “cannot confirm or deny the allegations” that two agents visited Phillips’ home. Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the Tesla Takedown movement or Musk’s allegations of coordinated violence against the company.

After the incident, Phillips began searching online for mentions of his name, and he found posts on X from an account that also tagged Joan Donovan and FBI director Kash Patel.

Phillips says that the FBI visit has had the opposite of a chilling effect. “If anything, it’s further radicalized me,” he says. “People having my back and the expression of support makes me feel very confident that it was the right thing to do to speak out about this.”

Organizing for the first time

Mike had attended a few protests in the past but didn’t know how to organize one. He has a wife, three small kids, a house in the suburbs, and a health issue that can sometimes make it hard to think. So by his own admission, his first attempt in February was a mixed bag. It was the San Francisco Bay Area-based Department of Labor employee’s first day back in the office after the Trump administration, spurred by DOGE, had demanded all workers return full-time. He was horrified by the fast-moving job cuts, program changes, and straight-up animus he had already seen flow from the White House down to his small corner of the federal government.

“Attacks on federal workers are an attack on the Constitution,” Mike says. Maybe, he figured, if he could keep people from buying Teslas, that would hurt Elon Musk’s bottom line, and the CEO would lay off DOGE altogether.

Mike, who WIRED is referring to using a pseudonym because he fears retaliation, saw that a Tesla showroom was just a 20-minute walk from his office, and he hoped to convince some coworkers to convene there, a symbolic stand against DOGE and Musk. So he taped a few flyers on light poles. He didn’t have social media, but he posted on Reddit. “I was really worried,” he says, “about the Hatch Act,” a law that limits the political activities of federal employees.

In the end, three federal workers—the person sitting next to him at the office and a US Department of Veterans Affairs nurse they ran into on the street—posted up outside of the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco holding “Save Federal Workers” signs.

Then Mike discovered the #TeslaTakedown website that Alex Winter had built. (Because of a quirk in the sign-up process, the site was putatively operated for a time by the Seattle Troublemakers.) It turned out a bunch of other people had thought that Tesla showrooms were the right places to air their grievances with Trump, Musk, and DOGE. Mike posted his event there. Now the SF Save Federal Workers protest, which happens every Monday afternoon, draws 20 to 40 people.

Through the weekly convening, Mike has met volunteers from the Federal Unionists Network, who represent public unions; the San Francisco Labor Council, a local affiliate of the national AFL-CIO; and the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. As in any amicable custody arrangement, Mike’s group shares the strip of sidewalk outside of the San Francisco Tesla showroom with a local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible, which holds bigger protests on Saturdays. “I’m trying to build connections, meet other community groups,” Mike says. “My next step is broadening the coalition.”

About half of the people coordinating Takedown protests are like Mike, says Evan Sutton, who is part of the national team: They haven’t organized a protest before. “I’ve been in politics professionally for almost 20 years,” Sutton says. “It is genuinely the most grassroots thing that I’ve seen.”

Well into the spring, Tesla Takedown organizers nationwide had held hundreds of events across the US and even the globe, and the movement has gained a patina of professionalism. Tesla Takedown sends press releases to reporters. The movement has buy-in from Indivisible, a progressive network that dates back to the first Trump administration, with local chapters hosting their own protests. At least one Democratic congressional campaign has promoted a local #TeslaTakedown event.

Beyond the showrooms, Tesla sales are down by half in Europe compared to last year and have taken a hit in California, the US’s biggest EV market. Celebrities including Sheryl Crow and Jason Bateman have publicly ditched their Teslas. A Hawaii-based artist named Matthew Hiller started selling “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy” car decals in 2023; he estimates he has sold 70,000 anti-Musk and anti-Tesla stickers since then. (There was a “Space X-size explosion of sales after his infamous salute,” Hiller says.) In Seattle, the Troublemakers regularly hold “de-badging” events, where small handfuls of sheepish owners come by to have the T emblems drilled off their cars.

In Portland, Oregon, on a recent May Saturday, Ed Niedermeyer was once again sweating through his shark costume as he hopped along the sidewalk in front of the local Tesla showroom. His sign exhibited the DOGE meme, an alert Shiba Inu, with the caption “Heckin’ fascism.” (You’d get it if you spent too much time on the Internet in 2013.) Honks rang out. The shark tends to get a good reaction from drivers going by, he said. About 100 people had shown up to this Takedown protest, in front of a Tesla showroom that sits kitty-corner to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Niedermeyer is a car writer and has spent a lot of time thinking about Elon Musk since 2015, when he discovered that Tesla wasn’t actually operating a battery swapping station like it said it did. Since then, he has written a book, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and documented many of what he claims to be Musk’s and the automaker’s half-truths on their way to the top.

Niedermeyer acknowledges that Musk and Tesla have proven difficult to touch, even by nationwide protests literally outside their doors.

Despite the Seattle cheers during Tesla’s last quarterly earnings call, the automaker’s stock price gained steam through the spring and rose on the news that its CEO would no longer officially work for the federal government. Musk has said investors should value Tesla not as a carmaker but as an AI and robotics company. At the end of this month, after years of delays, Tesla says it will launch a robotaxi service. According to Wall Street analysts’ research notes, they believe him.

Even a public fight with the president—one that devolved into name-calling on Musk’s and Trump’s respective social platforms—was not enough to pop the Tesla bubble.

“For me, watching Musk and watching our inability to stop him and create consequences for this snowballing hype and power has really reinforced that we need a stronger government to protect people from people like him,” says Niedermeyer.

Still, Tesla Takedown organizers take credit for the cracks in the Musk-Trump alliance—and say the protests will continue. The movement has also incorporated a more cerebral strategy, organizing local efforts to convince cities, states, and municipalities to divest from Musk’s companies. They already had a breakthrough in May, when Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, became the first US public pension fund to say it wouldn’t purchase new Tesla stocks for its managed investment accounts.

The movement’s goals may be lofty, but Niedermeyer argues that despite Tesla’s apparent resilience, Musk is still America’s most vulnerable billionaire. And sure, Musk, the CEO of an electric car company, the guy who made himself the figurehead for his automaker and fired his PR team to make sure it would stick, the one who alienated the electric car company’s customer base through a headlong plunge not only into political spending but the delicate mechanics of government itself—he did a lot of it on his own.

Now Niedermeyer, and everyone involved in Tesla Takedown, and probably everyone in the whole world, really, can only do what they can. So here he is, in a shark costume on the side of the road, maintaining the legally mandated distance from the car showroom behind him.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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Elon Musk counts the cost of his four-month blitz through US government

doge, elon musk, Policy, spacex, syndication, Tesla / /

Term at DOGE did serious damage to his brands, only achieved a fraction of hoped-for savings.

Elon Musk wields a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February to illustrate his aim to cut government waste Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Elon Musk’s four-month blitz through the US government briefly made him Washington’s most powerful businessman since the Gilded Age. But it has done little for his reputation or that of his companies.

Musk this week formally abandoned his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which has failed to find even a fraction of the $2 trillion in savings he originally pledged.

On Thursday, Donald Trump lamented his departure but said Musk “will always be with us, helping all the way.”

Yet the billionaire will be left calculating the cost of his involvement with Trump and the meagre return on his $250 million investment in the US president’s election campaign.

“I appreciate the fact that Mr Musk put what was good for the country ahead of what was good for his own bottom line,” Tom Cole, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told the Financial Times.

After Doge was announced, a majority of American voters believed Musk would use the body to “enrich himself and undermine his business rivals,” according to a survey, instead of streamlining the government.

Progressive groups warned that he would be “rigging federal procurement for billionaires and their pals” and cut regulations that govern his companies Tesla and SpaceX. Democratic lawmakers said Doge was a “cover-up” of a more sinister, self-serving exercise by the world’s richest person.

Early moves by the Trump administration suggested Musk might get value for money. A lawsuit brought by the Biden administration against SpaceX over its hiring practices was dropped in February, and regulators probing his brain-implant company Neuralink were dismissed.

Musk’s satellite Internet business Starlink was touted by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as a potential beneficiary of a $42 billion rural broadband scheme. An executive order calling for the establishment of a multibillion-dollar Iron Dome defense system in the US looked set to benefit Musk, due to SpaceX’s dominance in rocket launches.

The gutting of various watchdogs across government also benefited Musk’s businesses, while a number of large US companies rushed to ink deals with Starlink or increase their advertising spending on X. Starlink also signed agreements to operate in India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, among other countries it has long wished to expand into.

But while Doge took a scythe to various causes loathed by Musk, most notably international aid spending and government contracts purportedly linked to diversity initiatives or “woke” research, it also caused severe blowback to the billionaire’s businesses, particularly Tesla.

At one point during his Doge tenure, Tesla’s stock had fallen 45 percent from its highest point last year, and reports emerged that the company’s board of directors had sought to replace Musk as chief executive. The 53-year-old’s personal wealth dropped by tens of billions of dollars, while his dealerships were torched and death threats poured in.

Some of the brand damage to Tesla, until recently Musk’s primary source of wealth, could be permanent. “Eighty percent of Teslas in the US were sold in blue zip codes,” a former senior employee said. “Obviously that constituency has been deeply offended.”

Starlink lost lucrative contracts in Canada and Mexico due to Musk’s political activities, while X lost 11 million users in Europe alone.

Probes of Tesla and SpaceX by government regulators also continued apace, while the Trump administration pressed ahead with plans to abolish tax credits for electric vehicles and waged a trade war vehemently opposed by Musk that threatened to further damage car sales.

In the political arena, few people were cheered by Doge’s work. Democrats were outraged by the gutting of foreign aid and by Musk’s 20-something acolytes gaining access to the Treasury’s payment system, along with the ousting of thousands of federal workers. Republicans looked askance at attempts to target defense spending. And true budget hawks were bitter that Musk could only cut a few billion dollars. Bill Gates even accused Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” through his actions at Doge.

Musk, so used to getting his way at his businesses, struggled for control. At various points in his tenure he took on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, and trade tsar Peter Navarro, while clashing with several other senior officials.

Far from being laser-focused on eliminating waste, Musk’s foray into government was a “revenge tour” against a bureaucracy the billionaire had come to see as the enemy of innovation, a former senior colleague of Musk’s said, highlighting the entrepreneur’s frustration with COVID-19 regulations in California, his perceived snub by the Biden administration, and his anger over his daughter’s gender transition.

Trump’s AI and crypto tsar, David Sacks, an influential political voice in the tech world, “whipped [Musk] up into a very, very far-right kind of mindset,” the person added, to the extent that was “going to help this administration in crushing the ‘woke’ agenda.”

Neither Musk nor Sacks responded to requests for comment.

Musk, who claimed Doge only acted in an “advisory role,” this week expressed frustration at it being used as a “whipping boy” for unpopular cuts decided by the White House and cabinet secretaries.

“Trump, I think, was very savvy and allowed Doge to kind of take all those headlines for a traditional political scapegoat,” said Sahil Lavingia, head of a commerce start-up who worked for Doge until earlier this month. Musk, he added, might also have been keen to take credit for the gutting of USAID and other moves but ultimately garnered unwanted attention.

“If you were truly evil, [you] would just be more quiet,” said Lavingia, who joined the initiative in order to streamline processes within government. “You would do the evil stuff quietly.”

The noise surrounding Musk, whose ability to dominate news cycles with a single post on his social media site X rivaled Trump’s own hold on the headlines, also frustrated the administration.

This week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller took to X to indirectly rebut the billionaire’s criticism of Trump’s signature tax bill, which he had lambasted for failing to cut the deficit or codify Doge’s cuts.

Once almost synonymous with Musk, Doge is now being melded into the rest of government. In a briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that following Musk’s departure, cabinet secretaries would “continue to work with the respective Doge employees who have onboarded as political appointees at all of these agencies.”

She added: “The Doge leaders are each and every member of the President’s Cabinet and the President himself.”

Doge’s aims have also become decidedly more quotidian. Tom Krause, a Musk ally who joined Doge and was installed at Treasury, briefed congressional staff this week on improvements to the IRS’s application program interfaces and customer service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Other Doge staffers are doing audits of IT contracts—work Lavingia compares with that done by McKinsey consultants.

Freed from the constraints of being a government employee, Musk is increasingly threatening to become a thorn in Trump’s side.

Soon after his Doge departure was announced, he again criticized the White House, this time over its plan to cancel clean energy tax credits.

“Teddy Roosevelt had that great adage: ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’,” Fred Thiel, the chief executive of Bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings, told the FT. “Maybe Elon’s approach was a little bit different.”

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Judge lets four more DOGE employees access US Treasury payment systems

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A federal judge has given Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees access to US Treasury payment systems as long as they meet training and vetting requirements but denied the Trump administration’s motion to completely dissolve a preliminary injunction.

US District Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York is overseeing a case filed against President Trump by 19 states led by New York. In February, Vargas issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Treasury Department from granting DOGE access to systems containing personally identifiable information or confidential financial information.

In April, Vargas allowed DOGE employee Ryan Wunderly to access the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Services (BFS) system, after government declarations said “that Wunderly has undergone the same vetting and security clearance process that applies to any other Treasury Department employee provided with access to BFS payment systems.” In an order yesterday, Vargas ruled that four more employees can access the system.

“The issue before the Court is a narrow one. The parties are in agreement that, in light of this Court’s PI [Preliminary Injunction] Modification Order, the New DOGE Employees should be permitted to have access to BFS payment systems on the same terms as Wunderly,” Vargas wrote. “Treasury DOGE Team” employees Thomas Krause, Linda Whitridge, Samuel Corcos, and Todd Newnam have satisfied the conditions for accessing the system, she wrote.

Court won’t vet new hires

Additionally, the Trump administration can add more DOGE team members without the court’s prior approval. Saying that “there is little utility in having this Court function as Treasury’s de facto human resources officer each time a new team member is onboarded,” Varagas said the injunction’s restrictions won’t apply to staff who have met the requirements.

Judge lets four more DOGE employees access US Treasury payment systems Read More »

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Musk’s DOGE used Meta’s Llama 2—not Grok—for gov’t slashing, report says

AI, azure ai, department of government efficiency, doge, elon musk, grok, Llama 2, Meta, microsoft, Policy, xAI / /

Why didn’t DOGE use Grok?

It seems that Grok, Musk’s AI model, wasn’t available for DOGE’s task because it was only available as a proprietary model in January. Moving forward, DOGE may rely more frequently on Grok, Wired reported, as Microsoft announced it would start hosting xAI’s Grok 3 models in its Azure AI Foundry this week, The Verge reported, which opens the models up for more uses.

In their letter, lawmakers urged Vought to investigate Musk’s conflicts of interest, while warning of potential data breaches and declaring that AI, as DOGE had used it, was not ready for government.

“Without proper protections, feeding sensitive data into an AI system puts it into the possession of a system’s operator—a massive breach of public and employee trust and an increase in cybersecurity risks surrounding that data,” lawmakers argued. “Generative AI models also frequently make errors and show significant biases—the technology simply is not ready for use in high-risk decision-making without proper vetting, transparency, oversight, and guardrails in place.”

Although Wired’s report seems to confirm that DOGE did not send sensitive data from the “Fork in the Road” emails to an external source, lawmakers want much more vetting of AI systems to deter “the risk of sharing personally identifiable or otherwise sensitive information with the AI model deployers.”

A seeming fear is that Musk may start using his own models more, benefiting from government data his competitors cannot access, while potentially putting that data at risk of a breach. They’re hoping that DOGE will be forced to unplug all its AI systems, but Vought seems more aligned with DOGE, writing in his AI guidance for federal use that “agencies must remove barriers to innovation and provide the best value for the taxpayer.”

“While we support the federal government integrating new, approved AI technologies that can improve efficiency or efficacy, we cannot sacrifice security, privacy, and appropriate use standards when interacting with federal data,” their letter said. “We also cannot condone use of AI systems, often known for hallucinations and bias, in decisions regarding termination of federal employment or federal funding without sufficient transparency and oversight of those models—the risk of losing talent and critical research because of flawed technology or flawed uses of such technology is simply too high.”

Musk’s DOGE used Meta’s Llama 2—not Grok—for gov’t slashing, report says Read More »

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Trump admin tells Supreme Court: DOGE needs to do its work in secret

doge, Policy / /

DOJ complains of “sweeping, intrusive discovery” after DOGE refused FOIA requests.

A protest over DOGE’s reductions to the federal workforce outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building on March 19, 2025 in New York City. Credit: Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago

The Department of Justice today asked the Supreme Court to block a ruling that requires DOGE to provide information about its government cost-cutting operations as part of court-ordered discovery.

President Trump’s Justice Department sought an immediate halt to orders issued by US District Court for the District of Columbia. US Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the Department of Government Efficiency is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a presidential advisory body and not an official “agency.”

The district court “ordered USDS [US Doge Service] to submit to sweeping, intrusive discovery just to determine if USDS is subject to FOIA in the first place,” Sauer wrote. “That order turns FOIA on its head, effectively giving respondent a win on the merits of its FOIA suit under the guise of figuring out whether FOIA even applies. And that order clearly violates the separation of powers, subjecting a presidential advisory body to intrusive discovery and threatening the confidentiality and candor of its advice, putatively to address a legal question that never should have necessitated discovery in this case at all.”

The nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed FOIA requests seeking information about DOGE and sued after DOGE officials refused to provide the requested records.

US District Judge Christopher Cooper has so far sided with CREW. Cooper decided in March that “USDS is likely covered by FOIA and that the public would be irreparably harmed by an indefinite delay in unearthing the records CREW seeks,” ordering DOGE “to process CREW’s request on an expedited timetable.”

Judge: DOGE is not just an advisor

DOGE then asked the district court for a summary judgment in its favor, and CREW responded by filing a motion for expedited discovery “seeking information relevant to whether USDS wields substantial authority independent of the President and is therefore subject to FOIA.” In an April 15 order, Cooper ruled that CREW is entitled to limited discovery into the question of whether DOGE is wielding authority sufficient to bring it within the purview of FOIA. Cooper hasn’t yet ruled on the motion for summary judgment.

“The structure of USDS and the scope of its authority are critical to determining whether the agency is ‘wield[ing] substantial authority independently of the President,'” the judge wrote. “And the answers to those questions are unclear from the record.”

Trump’s executive orders appear to support CREW’s argument by suggesting “that USDS is exercising substantial independent authority,” Cooper wrote. “As the Court already noted, the executive order establishing USDS ‘to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda’ appears to give USDS the authority to carry out that agenda, ‘not just to advise the President in doing so.'”

Not satisfied with the outcome, the Trump administration tried to get Cooper’s ruling overturned in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The appeals court ruled against DOGE last week. The appeals court temporarily stayed the district court order in April but dissolved the stay on May 14 and denied the government’s petition.

“The government contends that the district court’s order permitting narrow discovery impermissibly intrudes upon the President’s constitutional prerogatives,” the appeals court said. But “the discovery here is modest in scope and does not target the President or any close adviser personally. The government retains every conventional tool to raise privilege objections on the limited question-by-question basis foreseen here on a narrow and discrete ground.”

US argues for secrecy

A three-judge panel at the appeals court was unswayed by the government’s claim that this process is too burdensome.

“Although the government protests that any such assertion of privilege would be burdensome, the only identified burdens are limited both by time and reach, covering as they do records within USDS’s control generated since January 20,” the ruling said. “It does not provide any specific details as to why accessing its own records or submitting to two depositions would pose an unbearable burden.”

Yesterday, the District Court set a discovery schedule requiring the government to produce all responsive documents within 14 days and complete depositions within 24 days. In its petition to the Supreme Court today, the Trump administration argued that DOGE’s recommendations to the president should be kept secret:

The district court’s requirement that USDS turn over the substance of its recommendations—even when the recommendations were “purely advisory”—epitomizes the order’s overbreadth and intrusiveness. The court’s order compels USDS to identify every “federal agency contract, grant, lease or similar instrument that any DOGE employee or DOGE Team member recommended that federal agencies cancel or rescind,” and every “federal agency employee or position that any DOGE employee or DOGE team member recommended” for termination or placement on administrative leave. Further, USDS must state “whether [each] recommendation was followed.”

It is difficult to imagine a more grievous intrusion and burden on a presidential advisory body. Providing recommendations is the core of what USDS does. Because USDS coordinates with agencies across the Executive Branch on an ongoing basis, that request requires USDS to review multitudes of discussions that USDS has had every day since the start of this Administration. And such information likely falls within the deliberative-process privilege almost by definition, as internal executive-branch recommendations are inherently “pre-decisional” and “deliberative.”

Lawsuit: “No meaningful transparency” into DOGE

The US further said the discovery “is unnecessary to answer the legal question whether USDS qualifies as an ‘agency’ that is subject to FOIA,” and is merely “a fishing expedition into USDS’s advisory activities under the guise of determining whether USDS engages in non-advisory activities—an approach to discovery that would be improper in any circumstance.”

CREW, like others that have sued the government over DOGE’s operations, says the entity exercises significant power without proper oversight and transparency. DOGE “has worked in the shadows—a cadre of largely unidentified actors, whose status as government employees is unclear, controlling major government functions with no oversight,” CREW’s lawsuit said. “USDS has provided no meaningful transparency into its operations or assurances that it is maintaining proper records of its unprecedented and legally dubious work.”

The Trump administration is fighting numerous DOGE-related lawsuits at multiple levels of the court system. Earlier this month, the administration asked the Supreme Court to restore DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration records after losing on the issue in both a district court and appeals court. That request to the Supreme Court is pending.

There was also a dispute over discovery when 14 states sued the federal government over Trump “delegat[ing] virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities.” A federal judge ruled that the states could serve written discovery requests on Musk and DOGE, but the DC Circuit appeals court blocked the discovery order. In that case, appeals court judges said the lower-court judge should have ruled on a motion to dismiss before allowing discovery.

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Trump admin tells Supreme Court: DOGE needs to do its work in secret Read More »

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Trump just made it much harder to track the nation’s worst weather disasters

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The Trump administration’s steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation’s most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that’s a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

“In alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer be updating the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product,” NOAA announced. “All past reports, spanning 1980-2024, and their underlying data remain authoritative, archived, and available,” NOAA said, but no data would be gathered for 2025 or any year after.

According to NCEI’s FAQ, every state has experienced at least one billion-dollar disaster since 1980, while some states, like Texas, have been hit by more than 100. The Central, South, and Southeast regions of the US are most likely to be hurt most by the data loss, as those regions “typically experience a higher frequency of billion-dollar disasters,” the FAQ said.

Trump just made it much harder to track the nation’s worst weather disasters Read More »