On a Thursday afternoon in early June, 12 staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency packed up their clothes and bedding from the sixth-floor of the Government Services Administration headquarters where they had been sleeping since February, and looked for new homes.
For months, the young engineers who had descended on the capital to shrink the federal bureaucracy had lived with the ever-present threat of backlash — public scrutiny, upset Cabinet officials, even the prospect that someone might assert criminal charges against them. But on the morning of June 5 something changed: Their figurehead, Elon Musk, had a falling-out with his patron, Donald Trump, that played out very publicly across the two men’s social media platforms.
The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.
As the sun fell on downtown Washington, the displaced dozen joined up with fellow DOGE staffers atop the nine-story GSA building, armed with beer, pretzels and La Croix, and prepared for something akin to a wake. Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.
Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering. Other DOGE leaders were less sanguine. “Guys, seriously,” one warned, “get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
White House officials were hoping for a clean break with the unwelcome headlines that had dogged Musk’s cost-slashing rampage. But those most committed to DOGE’s mission were not ready to yield to Trump’s political considerations.
Over the subsequent days and weeks, rival factions would compete for control of what Musk had built. Some sought to burrow deep inside the federal government and continue business as usual; others wanted to collaborate openly with the parts of government they previously eschewed. One of Musk’s chief lieutenants would openly defy White House orders to step down. At the same time, Musk was angling to lure remaining staffers to jobs at one of his private companies.
This account of the DOGE supernova, which left behind nebulous remnants throughout the government, is based on contemporaneous notes, photographs, correspondence and screenshots of Signal chats provided by participants in them. We interviewed nine former and current DOGE employees, along with four other administration and White House officials, many of whom were granted anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations without fear of retribution.
“President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government, and the Administration is committed to delivering on this pledge for the American people,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said in the White House’s only response to questions about the episode and DOGE’s legacy. (Musk and Park did not respond to requests to comment.)
What’s left of the Department of Government Efficiency looks nothing like what Musk envisioned, but he may have cleared the way for a more successful assault on the federal bureaucracy still underway.
The night after Musk’s farewell, senior DOGE figures who knew they wanted to stick around convened on a Signal call to discuss the future of their government modernization project. They grappled with what it would take for DOGE to survive. Could it be rebuilt into something new? And if so, under whose authority? How would it engage with other parts of government?
The Department of Governmental Efficiency had always been a moving target: an ambition to systematically remake the federal bureaucracy wrapped in a name that — in typical Musk fashion — mixed historic grandiosity with a juvenile refusal to take itself too seriously. Musk first pitched the idea to Trump in August 2024 when he interviewed Trump on a public X spaces call during his presidential campaign. It was a concept that Musk had to repeat multiple times during that session to get Trump’s attention.
Musk and Trump’s former campaign rival Vivek Ramaswamy arrived in December with a mandate to use technology to rein in government. They quickly assembled a group of 50 staffers, many of whom would work from the 6th floor of the General Services Administration. But no one could agree where they actually fit in the constitutional structure of American government.
Ramaswamy envisioned operating as an advisory body that could arm like-minded lawmakers to propose cuts through the budget process, and advise the executive branch on novel legal theories to push the bounds of its constitutional authority, according to a friend. Ramaswamy told associates that while regulatory reform could be achieved through executive action there was no way to meaningfully address the budget through the executive branch alone, and that cuts were best delivered by lawmakers.
But Musk had his own ideas, and they didn’t leave much room for Congress. He imagined DOGE as a strike force empowered to systematically dismantle lists of federal departments and agencies it considered redundant or unnecessary.
While Ramaswamy was enlisting members of Congress to join a DOGE caucus, Musk was bringing in employees by the dozen — software engineers and legal teams, many from his companies, and an HR department staffed entirely by SpaceX employees — working out of SpaceX’s own offices in Washington.
Perhaps the most important of the new DOGE employees was Steve Davis, an engineer in his mid-40s who had spent more than 20 years helping Musk cut costs at his companies. (Davis did not respond to requests for comment.)
For years, Davis had been Musk’s right-hand man. After Musk bought Twitter, Davis and his wife, Nicole Hollander, slept in the San Francisco headquarters of the Twitter office with their one-month-old child while they helped Musk cut the social media company to the bone. Once, according to a Musk biographer, they spent a Christmas Eve helping Musk move data servers.
Once Trump was sworn in, DOGE was ascendant. Musk’s team tore through dozens of agencies big and small, in search of line savings, personnel cuts and language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion programs that were identified through so-called “Command F” searches in contracts. All the cut contracts and purported savings were triumphantly (if at times misleadingly and inaccurately) itemized on a new DOGE.gov website.
In one fell swoop, Musk and a couple of DOGE staffers cut the country’s entire foreign-aid infrastructure by hollowing out the U.S. Agency for International Development. Other potentially transformative projects stayed out of the headlines, like an effort to install powerful federal chief information officers in federal agencies and an initiative to digitize the federal retirement process.
At the center of it all was Davis, who, as DOGE’s operational lead, acted as connective tissue for staffers embedded across agencies and their backchannel to the White House. Davis served as a special government employee, a status that enables individuals to cycle through federal posts for a 130-day period without fully abandoning their private-sector careers. (Hollander, who did not respond to a request for comment, joined DOGE to shrink the government’s real estate footprint.) Davis called up agencies, demanding they grant engineers unfettered access to their data and systems. Once engineers were embedded in those agencies, often their only point of contact to DOGE was instructions or meeting invitations from Davis delivered through Signal, the team’s primary method of communication.
Musk, too, was a special government employee but had the trappings of a Cabinet official, claiming a 10-room suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building as his own, along with a fleet of black SUVs to ferry him and top lieutenant Antonio Gracias around the capital. (Gracias did not respond to a request for comment.) Musk became a fixture at the White House, meeting weekly with chief of staff Susie Wiles and growing seemingly inseparable from Trump.
Davis was never far away and invariably at Musk’s side during Fox News interviews that were the only official media appearances for DOGE’s leaders. He was also part of a small group that briefed Vice President JD Vance in early February on DOGE’s progress, according to internal records shared with POLITICO. (Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting.)
DOGE’s rise and fall can be best measured through the impact of two blast emails to the federal workforce. The first, on Jan. 28 with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” prompted more than 77,000 to accept deferred resignation offers, with a total of 154,000 workers taking that and subsequent offers this year. (The deferred resignation arrangement took effect in September.) Then, nearly a month later, Musk sent out emails to every federal worker asking them to respond with a bullet-pointed list of five things that he or she did that week.
Cabinet officials, caught off guard by the mandate and implicit threat, scrambled to provide guidance to their staff. A number of national security agencies issued orders to ignore the request, out of concern employees would have to divulge confidential information by participating. Other agencies said they would respond on workers’ behalf.
“The height of our power was the five-bullets email,” said a DOGE official, calling it a “mistake” that pitted DOGE against departments and agencies who were increasingly frustrated by Musk’s lack of communication and heavyhandedness. “Then it turned into fear and revulsion and hatred.”
Americans took out their anger at Tesla dealerships, and complaints about DOGE cuts derailed GOP town halls so badly that the chair of House Republicans’ campaign arm warned his members to stop having in-person town halls with their constituents.
From that moment, DOGE lost more and more political power in an ongoing tug-of-war with administration officials. In a March Cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy both confronted Musk over his chainsaw approach to cutting parts of their departments. He had a physical altercation outside the Oval Office the following month with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, after Bessent called Musk a fraud and Musk responded with a bodycheck, according to an account that former Trump strategist Steve Bannon provided to the Washington Post.
White House staffers broke up the physical scuffle, which began with a dispute over leadership of the Internal Revenue Service, and Musk lost the political conflict when Trump sided with Bessent. Two Musk hands, including his pick for IRS commissioner, were ejected from the Treasury Department.
Musk grew weary of Washington after failing to get his way. In April, he told Tesla shareholders that he was scaling back his around-the-clock involvement in DOGE to just one or two days per week. Davis and Gracias assumed Musk’s role of interacting with the White House. But they did not bring the same clout, and Trump aides quickly recognized that they could say no to Musk’s aides in a way they could not to Musk himself — a power only Trump had possessed.
Those within the White House also knew that turning their back on the DOGE brand did not have to mean abandoning their desire to wage war on the federal bureaucracy with whatever means possible. All along, at the Office of Management and Budget, director Russell Vought was more quietly plotting his own methodical culling of the federal workforce.
On May 22, Musk joined a late-night meeting with senior members of the core DOGE team. Katie Miller, a key conduit with the White House, where her husband Stephen served as deputy chief of staff, delivered a blunt message: DOGE was on thin ice, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.
The best way to keep the peace with the White House, Katie Miller advised DOGE leaders, was to collaborate with Cabinet secretaries and stop presenting them with cuts or efficiency projects they didn’t want to do. (She declined to comment on the call.)
One week later, White House officials prepared a respectful farewell for Musk, putting a bow on what they generally saw as a mutually beneficial 10-month relationship. They extended no such courtesy to Davis, and unceremoniously informed reporters that he was out.
On May 31, after smiling with Trump for the cameras at an Oval Office farewell, Musk hosted his own private goodbye for DOGE team members in the august office suite he was about to vacate.
Musk instructed them to rethink how they went about their work, urging the next iteration of DOGE to be decentralized and to work with Cabinet secretaries to cut regulations and improve how the government functioned.
Davis was not present at the meeting but joined via telephone. He, too, offered reassurances and then said he did not intend to go anywhere, a remark interpreted by the group to mean he would rejoin the federal government perhaps in a different capacity. Attendees clapped in response.
But within days, they realized that was not what Davis meant at all. Despite being let go by the White House, he intended to stay on as the de facto head of DOGE. It would be “business as usual,” Davis took to telling people.
On June 3, Davis strode into DOGE’s weekly Thursday evening meeting at GSA, assigning tasks as though he held the reins of the leaderless organization, according to photos and accounts of the meetings.
Even as the White House had announced his departure the previous week, Davis had steadfastly refused to acknowledge anything had changed, unwilling to give up any of the far-reaching authority he had amassed over the past six months — backed by well-placed allies.
“Steve Davis remains in charge until he says he’s not,” acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian insisted to DOGE employees that week, according to notes taken by someone who heard the comment.
That did not sit well with another group of DOGE staffers with senior roles in the agencies who thought it was inappropriate for someone no longer working for the government to direct federal work.
“It wasn’t just a couple, it was like a lot of people asking what do we do about this?” a second administration official explained.
In the fraught days that followed, DOGE fractured. Senior figures embedded in the agencies convened a series of ad hoc meetings without Davis. They gamed out legislative proposals, speculated on how to engage with the White House and OMB, and quietly sought advice from DOGE general counsel Austin Raynor, who had moved to the White House Counsel’s Office, on whether they should engage with Davis. (Raynor didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
One core group of DOGE members was skeptical of Davis’ authority and eager to use the post-Musk transition to tie their work more closely to the White House. Others saw in the disarray a chance to push their own priorities. Joe Gebbia, an Airbnb founder who had been working on a program to digitize federal retirement records, pitched an “America by Design” initiative that would focus on creating signage as iconic as the NASA logo, government services as intuitive as the interstate system.
“There’s a faction of DOGE that wants to hide from PPO, delete the DOGE brand, and burrow in the government to protect themselves,” Pentagon DOGE staffer Yinon Weiss wrote in a group chat that included colleagues based at CIA and in the Treasury, HHS, and Energy departments. All were uncomfortable with Davis running DOGE as a nongovernmental employee. “I think we should be doing all of the opposite things,” Weiss wrote, like working with the Presidential Personnel Office to expand DOGE’s reach. (Weiss declined to comment on the exchange.)
The loyalty that Davis inspired in some DOGE employees combined with deep skepticism from others to make that kind of clean transition impossible. And it complicated an already uncertain transition from a tight-knit club of non-government types recruited through Musk’s network into a decentralized organization that would be accepted by the rest of the federal government.
When Davis learned that a breakaway faction was gathering on a Saturday afternoon at the offices of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to plot a strategy for DOGE’s future, he began calling likely attendees and told them not to attend what he called the “coup” meeting. (The firm did not respond to a request for comment on its role in DOGE’s work.) Those at the meeting who looked at their phones would have seen their fortunes change in real time, as they were removed from Signal group chats — DOGE’s primary status marker of who belonged.
“Steve Davis conducted an internal purge against anyone not completely loyal directly to him,” said a former DOGE official with direct knowledge of the events.
Between May and June, dozens of DOGE employees left their posts. Some were pushed out by Davis’ allies after expressing concern about his authority. Some left because they had come to Washington only for Musk, and saw no point in staying once he was gone. Others told colleagues they were quitting out of exhaustion, drained by the drama at the top and disillusioned by the collapse of the political cover that once made their work possible.
And the trappings of DOGE’s once-privileged place in the federal government — the black SUVs, the dedicated parking spaces at GSA, the armed guard checking off names of those allowed entry to the 6th floor — vanished along with them.
As the White House became aware of Davis’ attempts to continue wielding power, the Presidential Personnel Office set to work rooting out Davis’ influence throughout the government. Trump’s appointees, under the direction of then-personnel chief Sergio Gor, quietly contacted DOGE staffers, sometimes through the White House liaisons in the agencies, with instructions to cease all communication with Davis. (Gor didn’t respond to a request for comment on his role.) Personnel office staffers also began to conduct 15-minute interviews with DOGE staffers to determine what exactly each did. At least one Cabinet member was informed that he was free to fire any name he found from lists of DOGE employees.
Under continued pressure from the White House, Davis concluded by June 10 that he had no choice but to relinquish some control. He identified a quartet of Musk followers within DOGE, including Musk’s personal banker Anthony Armstrong and former private-equity executive Josh Gruenbaum, to take over. That four-headed group, Davis believed, could keep DOGE’s original mission intact even without its original figureheads. (A request for comment for Armstrong from his current employer xAI was met with the automated response “Legacy Media Lies.”)
But that leadership structure did not last long. On July 21, the White House attempted to blunt the influence of DOGE staff over the General Services Administration by installing Mike Rigas, a former OMB and GSA official with ties to Trump and Vought, as acting administrator. Rigas brought with him a group of institutionalists who served during Trump’s first term, adding a new layer of management atop the two prominent DOGE officials who had been effectively leading GSA at the time. (GSA and Rigas did not respond to requests for comment.)
“Controlling the GSA was the DOGE nexus of power,” said a DOGE official familiar with the White House’s thinking. “This neuters it.”
A quieter, more dispersed version of DOGE began to emerge, its members plugging away at fairly specific policy areas with whatever authority and resources they had left. Forty-five DOGE employees remain as of October, a White House shutdown plan revealed, plus dozens more who have transitioned to working for an agency full-time.
Atop the GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, Gruenbaum is striking deals with tech companies for the widespread implementation of AI throughout the federal government. Gruenbaum, who declined to comment on his role, also contributed to the so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence in Education” that most universities have resisted signing and is now in Israel implementing the administration’s Gaza peace plan.
Adam Blake is leading a team within the Department of Energy focused on the expansion of nuclear energy projects, and Jeremy Lewin — who was initially assigned to implement the restructuring of USAID — now oversees foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious-freedom issues at the State Department. He is working with Rubio to turn the dependency-based foreign assistance into a bilateral model of economic development. (Both Blake and Lewin declined to comment on their work.)
Ehikian has left government to become CEO of C3 AI, and has pitched current government officials on its products, an administration official said. Armstrong now serves as chief financial officer of Musk’s xAI.
The most prominent governmental survivor of the Musk-era DOGE is Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb and former self-identified Democrat who says he voted for Trump in the 2024 election, describing himself as swayed by concerns about border security.
Gebbia remained popular both within DOGE and at the White House by staying focused on the popular effort to digitize the federal retirement system, and avoiding the factional conflicts that helped to split DOGE. In August, Trump elevated Gebbia to be U.S. chief design officer, sitting atop a newly created entity called the National Design Studio that advises agencies on websites on “usability and aesthetics.” (Gebbia did not respond to a request for comment.)
Gebbia is pursuing that vision with the full blessing of a White House that views the narrower mandate as more politically palatable than Musk’s wanton cutting. When Trump signed an executive order announcing Gold Cards, a chance to receive U.S. citizenship at the price of $1 million, it was the National Design Studio that designed the sleek website — more evocative of a credit-card issuer’s than the immigration bureaucracy — that foreigners could use to apply.
Some federal workers still fearful for their jobs look beyond the executive order creating the National Design Studio as a new entity and see it as little more than a corporate-style rebrand of the tarnished DOGE — much as Blackwater became Xe and Philip Morris became Altria. If so, it is a meager substitute for the Musk-era colossus, bereft of the wide-ranging and unfettered access to multiple agencies that DOGE staffers enjoyed early on in the administration.
“Now, if somebody from DOGE, or representing themselves from DOGE, asked me to do something, I wouldn’t just blindly do it,” said a former DOGE official who now reports to a federal agency.
The animating impulse behind DOGE — to shrink government without regard for Congress’s spending decisions — may in fact be stronger than ever. Now that project is in the hands of Vought, who was plotting how to reduce the federal workforce back when Musk still described himself as “involved in politics as little as possible.”
While DOGE was drawing ire for its haphazard, wanton cuts with volatile personalities, Vought was stocking the Office of Management and Budget with dozens of policy experts, largely old Washington hands more likely to spend their nights reading white papers and budget tables than being chronically online. (Vought declined to comment.)
Over the course of the year, Vought’s staff put together the president’s proposal for the federal budget, used executive authority to control agency spending, and sent so-called “pocket recissions” — a legally questionable maneuver to cancel appropriated funds near the fiscal year’s end, without sufficient time for Congress to reject it — to Capitol Hill.
The politics of making such cuts, ironically, have grown easier due to the fury that DOGE incited. Vought’s methodical and relatively low-key approach — despite provoking legal challenges — has yet to inspire the type of media attention, or sustained public outrage, that DOGE did.
The government shutdown that ended last week became an opportunity for Vought to do more. His first move was to yank funding for a set of congressionally approved programs primarily in Democratic-leaning states, from a project to restore aquatic habitat for salmon and steelhead trout in California to an interstate tunnel linking New York and New Jersey. In the shutdown’s second week, Vought ordered that more than 4,000 federal workers receive layoff notices from the agencies that employed them.
Though the firings and the cuts were reversed as a part of the deal that Republicans struck with Democrats to re-open the government, Oct. 10 marked the largest single day of cuts to federal personnel since Musk was at the peak of his powers in March. And helping to assemble the detailed “reduction in force” plans were some of the DOGE employees still working for the administration.
This weekend, many current and former DOGE members have descended on Austin for a DOGE reunion. It comes just days after Musk returned to Washington for his first public appearance in the nation’s capital since Trump’s farewell in May. At a White House dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump greeted Musk warmly with a little pat on the stomach.
Both Musk and Davis are both expected to be at the reunion event in Texas, and some attendees believe it is inevitable that discussion will turn to what DOGE becomes next.
But those who maneuvered against Davis this summer? They were not invited to participate.
