Department of Government Efficiency

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the name given in Executive Order 14158 of January 20, 2025 to an initiative implemented through the United States Digital Service, which the order renamed the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and placed in the Executive Office of the President.¹ The order created within it a temporary organization, the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, that "shall terminate on July 4, 2026," required each agency head to establish a DOGE Team of at least four employees within thirty days, and directed agency heads to ensure that USDS had "full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems."¹ Elon Musk was publicly identified as its leader until May 30, 2025.²

Announcement and executive orders

In November 2024 President-elect Donald Trump announced on X the formation of a "Department of Government Efficiency" "to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies," and named Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as its incoming leaders; on November 20, 2024 the two published an article in the Wall Street Journal describing "embedded appointees" at federal agencies and "mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy."³ Christopher Cooper wrote that USDS commenced operations before the inauguration and that, as reported, its employees communicated through the encrypted application Signal during the transition.³

Executive Order 14158 provides that the USDS Administrator reports to the White House Chief of Staff, that each agency's DOGE Team will typically include a team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist and an attorney, and that the order "displaces all prior executive orders and regulations, insofar as they are subject to direct presidential amendment, that might serve as a barrier to providing USDS access to agency records and systems."¹ Later orders directed agencies to consult DOGE team leads on hiring (Executive Order 14210, February 11, 2025), and to review "all existing covered contracts and grants" with DOGE officials (Executive Order 14222, February 26, 2025); an order of March 20, 2025 (Executive Order 14243) directed agencies to ensure that federal officials designated by the President or agency heads have "full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems," and directed that the Secretary of the Department of Labor and designees receive "unfettered access" to unemployment and payment records held by its Office of Inspector General.⁴⁵ The White House identified Amy Gleason as the USDS Administrator on February 25, 2025; the government provided the court with no information about who held the post before her.³

Musk's formal status

In the suit brought by the states led by New Mexico, Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that the defendants "formally classify Musk as a 'special Government employee,'" citing paragraphs 3 and 4 of a declaration of Joshua Fisher.⁶ A special government employee may serve for up to 130 days in any consecutive 365-day period under 18 U.S.C. 202(a).⁷ The same suit alleged, as summarized by the court, that on February 1, 2025 Musk telephoned officials of the United States Agency for International Development and pressured them to give DOGE personnel access to the agency's building, and that on February 2 he wrote on X that "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper."⁶ National Public Radio reported on May 30, 2025 that lawyers for the government had insisted that Musk had no legal authority and had downplayed his efforts.²

On March 12, 2025 Chutkan had granted in part the states' request for expedited discovery; on March 26, 2025 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in In re Musk (No. 25-5072), stayed that order pending further order, and in June 2025 the states told the district court that they would not move for a preliminary injunction, the basis for the expedited discovery.⁸ On May 27, 2025 Chutkan denied the government's motion to dismiss the states' claims that the creation of DOGE was ultra vires and that Musk exercised significant authority without Senate confirmation in violation of the Appointments Clause, and dismissed the President as a defendant.⁶ On March 23, 2026, in the consolidated suit of the Japanese American Citizens League and other nonprofits, she wrote that Musk had left government, citing a declaration of Gleason, that the declaration "indicates that DOGE is still up and running," and that the Appointments Clause and ultra vires claims continued against his successor, while she dismissed the Administrative Procedure Act and freestanding separation of powers claims; the states had by then voluntarily dismissed their claims.⁵

Treasury payment systems

Two people were assigned to the Department of the Treasury team: Marko Elez, named a Special Advisor for Information Technology and Modernization on January 21, 2025 and appointed as a temporary transitional Schedule C employee, and Tom Krause, who took an oath on January 23, 2025 as a "consultant" under 5 U.S.C. 3109.⁷ The appointing official did not execute Krause's paperwork until February 3, listing a start date of February 9, and on February 10 executed revised documentation backdating the appointment to January 23; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delegated the duties of the Fiscal Assistant Secretary to Krause on February 5, and Krause took them up on February 13 after being sworn as a temporary transitional Schedule C employee.⁷ Krause was designated a special government employee, serves without pay, and kept his position as chief executive officer of Cloud Software Group, Inc.⁷ On January 26, 2025 the Bureau of the Fiscal Service began a "payment process engagement plan" with the team, and the court recorded that Elez resigned on February 6, 2025.⁷

On February 8, 2025 a judge of the Southern District of New York sitting as emergency judge restrained the Treasury Department, on the application of nineteen states, from granting access to payment records or systems containing personal or financial information to political appointees, special government employees and detailees from other agencies.⁹ The case, New York v. Trump (No. 25-cv-1144), was assigned to Judge Jeannette Vargas, who issued a preliminary injunction on February 21, 2025.⁷ On March 7, 2025 Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied a preliminary injunction in Alliance for Retired Americans v. Bessent (No. 25-cv-313) for want of a showing of irreparable harm, writing that she would not hesitate to find it if the defendants planned to make private information public or to share it outside the government without confidentiality obligations; on March 5, 2026 she granted summary judgment to the defendants on the grounds that the challenged decisions were not final agency action and that the ultra vires standard was not met.⁷¹⁰ The Federalist reported that Vargas later softened the injunction to permit access subject to vetting, training and reporting conditions, and that on September 23, 2026 she dismissed the states' access claims as moot because the executive order establishing DOGE had expired and dismissed the remaining claims.¹¹

Health and Human Services, Labor and other agencies

In American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations v. Department of Labor (No. 25-cv-339), Judge John Bates set out, from the defendants' interrogatory responses, the access granted to DOGE affiliates.⁴ Luke Farritor, a recent hire of the General Services Administration, accepted a detail to the Department of Health and Human Services on January 21, 2025 and on his second day was granted administrator access to the Payment Management System, which holds grantees' Social Security numbers; he was also detailed to USDS and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.⁴ Aram Moghaddassi and Gleason were granted access to HHS systems on February 19 and 24, 2025; Gleason was hired as an HHS employee on March 5, 2025.⁴ Edward Coristine, a GSA detailee to USDS and HHS, and Elez, a dual Treasury and Labor hire and detailee to USDS and to at least three other agencies, were granted access to the HHS Integrated Data Repository and its general ledger system, which hold Medicare patient data, although the opinion states that it is unclear whether they logged into the systems.⁴ On March 21, 2025, the day after the March 20 executive order, the Labor Department's chief information officer granted Moghaddassi and Elez access to the unemployment insurance data system.⁴ Bates had denied two motions for temporary restraining orders; on April 16, 2025 he held that the complaint stated an ultra vires claim against USDS and some Administrative Procedure Act claims but not a standalone Privacy Act claim, and on June 27, 2025 he denied a preliminary injunction, writing that absent evidence that the personnel would imminently misuse or publicly disclose the information he could not say that irreparable harm would clearly occur, and that the court's "concerns are as grave as ever."¹² On March 31, 2026 Bates held that the union plaintiffs had standing, denied cross-motions for summary judgment on the Administrative Procedure Act counts because of genuine disputes of material fact, and granted summary judgment to the defendants on the statutory ultra vires count; on May 26, 2026 he authorized limited discovery.⁴¹³ Separately, a disclosure by a cybersecurity employee of the National Labor Relations Board in April 2025 is described at NLRB Data Exfiltration.

Social Security Administration

The suit of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Alliance for Retired Americans and the American Federation of Teachers against the Social Security Administration (No. 25-cv-596, District of Maryland) was filed on February 21, 2025 and amended on March 7, 2025 to add as defendants Musk, as "Senior Advisor to the President and de facto head of DOGE," and Gleason as Acting Administrator of USDS.¹⁴ Judge Ellen Hollander issued a temporary restraining order on March 20, 2025 and a preliminary injunction on April 17, 2025, recording that the agency's DOGE Team consisted of five special government employees and six detailees and that Antonio Gracias, appointed on February 23, 2025, was described in agency documents as a former director of Tesla, Inc. from 2007 to 2021.¹⁴¹⁵ The Supreme Court of the United States stayed the injunction on June 6, 2025 by a vote of six to three, writing that "SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work"; Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, and Elena Kagan would have denied the application.¹⁴¹⁶ On April 10, 2026 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, vacated the injunction by nine votes to six on the ground that irreparable harm had not been shown, while nine judges agreed that the plaintiffs had standing.¹⁴

On January 16, 2026 the agency filed a "Notice of Corrections to the Record" in the district court disclosing that, on its review of records obtained during or after October 2025, a DOGE Team member had run searches containing personal information on the morning of March 24, 2025 before access ended around noon, that a March 3, 2025 email copied a DOGE advisor on an encrypted attachment the agency believed contained personal information derived from its systems, and that a DOGE Team member had executed a "Voter Data Agreement" with a political advocacy group seeking to analyze state voter rolls.¹⁴ In the Fourth Circuit's en banc decision Judge King wrote in a concurring and dissenting opinion that it was "beyond passing strange" that only the agency, and not the two DOGE entities or two DOGE officials who were defendants, had filed the notice.¹⁴

On August 26, 2025 the Government Accountability Project, representing the agency's chief data officer Charles Borges, sent a disclosure to the Senate and House committees and the Office of Special Counsel alleging that after the Supreme Court's stay, on June 10, 2025, a DOGE-aligned official asked agency information technology staff for a cloud environment to which the NUMIDENT database could be transferred, that the request changed on June 11 to a transfer to a test environment with full administrative access for the requester, and that on June 12 a career official in the Office of the Chief Information Officer submitted a risk acceptance form scoring the request 15, in the "very high" range.¹⁷ The disclosure also alleges that after the March 20 restraining order the agency revoked access on March 21, that within twenty-four hours senior employees with administrative privileges were instructed on the evening of March 21 to restore access for two DOGE employees with forty-two profiles, and that the Office of Information Security revoked it again on March 24.¹⁷ The disclosure also alleges that on June 25, 2025 the Office of the Chief Information Officer elevated a further developed request to the agency's chief information officer Michael Russo to copy live NUMIDENT production data to the DOGE cloud environment, and that Russo answered "Approved...."¹⁷ The disclosure names Coristine, Moghaddassi, John Solly (spelled Solley elsewhere in the document) and Michael Russo, and states in a footnote that Moghaddassi had previously worked for Musk's companies Neuralink and X.¹⁷ FedScoop reported that Borges resigned from the agency on August 29, 2025, in a letter stating that the agency's actions against him constituted a "constructive discharge."¹⁸

On March 10, 2026 the plaintiffs filed a notice enclosing a Washington Post article reporting that a former DOGE member allegedly told co-workers that he possessed two restricted databases, NUMIDENT and the Master Death File, and had at least one on a thumb drive; the government responded that the article was unconfirmed.¹⁴ On June 5, 2026 the plaintiffs filed a second notice summarizing a declaration of Jeremiah Schofield, a senior agency executive, which, as summarized by Judge Hollander from the plaintiffs' notice, states that DOGE personnel directed staff to add inaccurate death dates to records, that the Department of Homeland Security asked Schofield to "kill off" 6,000 individuals despite a lack of evidence that they were dead and sent a list of 2.7 million names with the same request, that Schofield and colleagues reviewed a sample and found the vast majority to be citizens or lawful permanent residents, and that a DHS official, Jon Koval, later told Schofield the directives were intended either to drive those individuals to self-deport or to bring them to Social Security offices where Immigration and Customs Enforcement could detain them.¹⁴ The government answered that the conduct postdated the agency action challenged and that the stories had been public for over a year.¹⁴ The agency's chief of human resources stated in a declaration filed on May 1, 2026 that the agency had no DOGE Team, members or affiliates, and that its chief information officer, Russo, and its general counsel, Mark A. Steffenson, "had prior association with DOGE before onboarding at SSA."¹⁴ On June 26, 2026 Hollander denied the government's motion to rescind her order permitting discovery.¹⁴

Freedom of Information Act litigation

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. U.S. DOGE Service (No. 25-cv-511) concerned requests for records of USDS. On March 10, 2025 Cooper declined to order production by March 10 but, after the government stated that it would not process the request because USDS was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, issued a preliminary injunction on the ground that USDS was likely an agency exercising "substantial authority independent of the President" and ordered expedited processing; he reaffirmed it on March 19, 2025.³¹⁹ On June 6, 2025 the Supreme Court granted the government's application, treated it as a petition for a writ of certiorari and granted it, vacated the court of appeals' order denying mandamus and remanded, holding that portions of the discovery order requiring disclosure of the content of intra-executive-branch USDS recommendations and whether they were followed were "not appropriately tailored"; Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson would have denied the application.²⁰ The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided No. 25-5130 on July 14, 2025 and denied rehearing on December 18, 2025; the government's petition for certiorari in U.S. DOGE Service v. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 25-1103, was filed on March 18, 2026 and distributed for the conference of September 28, 2026.²¹

Conflicts of interest and savings claims

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the United States Senate, through its minority staff under Senator Richard Blumenthal, issued a memorandum on April 27, 2025 stating that as of January 20, 2025 Musk and his companies were subject to at least 65 actual or potential actions by 11 federal agencies, with estimated potential liability of at least $2.37 billion across 40 of them, including $1.19 billion for statements about Tesla's driver-assistance features.²² On July 31, 2025 Blumenthal released a minority staff report stating that DOGE had generated at least $21.7 billion in waste between January 20 and July 18, 2025, and referred its findings to inspectors general at 27 agencies.²³ The court in New Mexico v. Musk recorded the complaint's allegation that DOGE publicly claimed savings through "contract/lease cancellations[,] grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions."⁵ National Public Radio wrote that its own reporting had repeatedly found the savings claims overstated or inaccurate and that Musk's target had been revised downward from $2 trillion to about $150 billion.²

Contributions by Musk

The Federal Election Commission OpenFEC database attributes to Elon Musk itemized contributions to America PAC (C00879510), which first filed on May 22, 2024, of $14,950,000 in July 2024, $30,000,000 in August, $30,000,000 in September, $118,600,000 in October, $4,112,036.50 in November, $8,200,000 in February 2025, $6,500,000 in March, $3,250,000 in April, $400,000 in August, $750,000 in December and $1,000,000 in March 2026, a total of $217,762,036.50 excluding memo-coded entries; a further 23 memo-coded attribution entries, which include in-kind petition incentives, total more than $82 million, and a separate entry of $17,425 for in-kind travel on April 23, 2025 is recorded under the name Elon Musk Revocable Trust.²⁴ The same database lists $5,000,000 to MAGA Inc. on June 27, 2025; $10,000,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund on October 1, 2024 and $5,000,000 on each of June 27 and December 15, 2025; $5,000,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund on each of June 27 and December 15, 2025; $10,000,000 to Fight for Kentucky on January 14, 2026; $5,000,000 to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims on May 8, 2026; and $924,600 to Trump 47 Committee, Inc. on October 21, 2024.²⁴

Departure and wind-down

NPR reported that Musk framed his departure as the end of his "scheduled time" as a special government employee, and on May 30, 2025, a 130-day tenure, he appeared with Trump in the Oval Office, where Trump gave him a ceremonial key.² Reuters reported on November 24, 2025 that DOGE had disbanded with eight months left on its mandate; Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, had told the agency "That doesn't exist" when asked about DOGE's status, and said it was no longer a "centralized entity".²⁵ In May 2026 the Social Security Administration told the District of Maryland that it had no DOGE Team and that the temporary organization would expire on July 4, 2026.¹⁴