After all the job cuts, defunding, Trump administration gives DOGE quiet burial

The US Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, once headed with obnoxious fanfare by billionaire Elon Musk before his bust up with the Prez — has dissolved with the quiet reluctance of a failed start-up slipping out the back door, leaving behind not a streamlined, revitalised federal system as promised, but a scatter of disrupted lives, dismantled programmes and unanswered questions.

For months, it was trumpeted as the flagship reform engine of President Donald Trump’s second term — the bold, muscular instrument that would carve bloat out of “the Swamp” as the Biden administration was termed. Yet, with eight months still left on its original mandate, DOGE has essentially ceased to exist, acknowledged only grudgingly and only when directly confronted.

The confirmation came not through a press conference or formal announcement but in an almost throwaway remark by Scott Kupor, director of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the government’s central human-resources agency. Asked directly by Reuters whether DOGE continued to operate, he replied, with disarming bluntness: “That doesn’t exist.”

And with that, the signature initiative of Trump’s reform crusade was reduced to a past-tense footnote.

Kupor elaborated only slightly, saying DOGE was no longer a “centralised entity”. That phrase, delivered with bureaucratic restraint, masks something far more consequential: an entire workforce was disrupted, multiple federal agencies had their budgets frozen or pared back, and years of institutional memory were haemorrhaged — all for a project that has now evaporated without explanation. In a city accustomed to political amnesia, even by Washington standards, the quietness of DOGE’s burial has raised eyebrows.

For all its bravado, DOGE’s most measurable impact came in the form of job losses and staffing freezes that weakened the very machinery meant to serve millions of Americans. Trump’s blanket hiring freeze on his first day in office, enforced zealously through DOGE, brought recruitment pipelines to a halt.

Critical vacancies went unfilled. Departments already strained by retirements or increased responsibilities suddenly found themselves unable to hire even replacements. In many agencies, management resorted to creative contortions simply to keep essential operations afloat.

When Trump later decreed that agencies should hire “no more than one employee for every four that depart”, DOGE enforced the rule with theatrical strictness. It was astonishingly effective at reducing headcount — though not, as it turned out, in a way that improved public services.

For those who lost opportunities, promotions or job security, the administration offered no guidance and no compensation. And now, with DOGE dissolved, will any of those eliminated roles be restored? Will the departments forced into paralysis be allowed to rebuild? Or is the expectation that those long-suffering public servants simply absorb the damage and move on?

It is here that DOGE’s collapse begins to feel less like reform and more like political theatre. When DOGE was launched in January, the fanfare bordered on self-parody: Cabinet secretaries posting breathless updates; DOGE-branded graphics flooding social media; and Musk — the initiative’s initial mascot — turning up at CPAC brandishing a chainsaw above his head, triumphantly declaring it the “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”

It was an image engineered for virality, crafted to delight supporters and enrage critics. But was it ever a serious plan? Chainsaws make excellent props; they make very poor administrative tools.

DOGE claimed to have saved “tens of billions of dollars”. Yet the claim was delivered without documentation, without independent audits, without a single public breakdown of the supposed savings. Outside analysts could not verify any of the numbers. In effect, DOGE produced savings in the same manner it produced spectacle: through assertion rather than evidence.

Meanwhile, real programmes were quietly starved of funding. Community health grants were delayed. Modernisation initiatives stalled. Environmental enforcement teams shrank. Overstretched caseworkers in key departments saw caseloads increase while colleagues departed. The administration called this “efficiency”. Federal workers called it something else entirely.

And now that DOGE has drifted into irrelevance, who will answer for the programmes halted mid-stream? Who will acknowledge the families whose jobs disappeared in the name of a now-abandoned branding exercise? Will the government reopen the posts that DOGE wiped out? Will Congress be asked to refill the budget lines? Or were these cuts merely sacrifices to the spectacle, forgotten as quickly as the chainsaw prop was put away?

DOGE’s operational culture added its own peculiar flourish. Several of its early hires were chosen less for administrative expertise and more for their social-media resonance. Edward Coristine — who cheerfully goes by the moniker 'Big Balls' online — encouraged strangers on X to apply to a federal department as if it were a gaming discord server.

Joe Gebbia, Airbnb’s co-founder, appeared with an ill-defined mandate to “beautify” government websites. Other DOGE-linked staff were somehow given early access to health and defence systems before migrating to unrelated senior positions elsewhere.

This fluid movement of DOGE personnel — some now at health and human services, others directing foreign assistance at the state department, still others overseeing naval research — further highlights how loosely conceived the project was. Were these people meant to dismantle agencies, redesign them, or simply reappear in new posts once DOGE’s usefulness as a campaign device had run its course?

That such a high-profile initiative could vanish without so much as an official statement might be absurd if it were not so predictable. Trump himself now refers to DOGE in the past tense. The once-vaunted hiring freeze is over. The “one-in-four” staffing rule is no more. Functions once under DOGE’s authority have reverted quietly to the OPM, the very bureaucratic entity DOGE was meant to overshadow.

And yet, the executive order Trump signed early in his term insisted DOGE would remain operational through July 2026. What happened to that decree? Why is it suddenly irrelevant? Did it, too, simply stop existing? Or was DOGE always intended more as rhetorical stagecraft than administrative instrument?

What remains are unsettling questions: What happens to the thousands of employees whose career trajectories were upended? What happens to the public services undermined by understaffing? Who will fix the dormant programmes, the shrivelled budgets, the months of lost capacity? And above all: why was a project with such sweeping consequences allowed to dissolve without the slightest accounting for the damage it caused?