"The operation was driven with a
frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory
oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies.
On the last Friday of September
2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon
Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
Mr. Musk’s visit was meant to be
discreet. Still skittish about getting involved publicly in politics, he told
the guests he had to be careful about supporting anyone in the Republican
nomination fight. And yet here he was — joined by Claire Boucher, the singer
known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children — at a $50,000-a-head dinner
in honor of the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an
entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.
As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held
forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with
knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border;
the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his
rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling
of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the
gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the
party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company
that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the
company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk
offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said
jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
What started as musings at a dinner
party evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. It was driven
with a frenetic focus by Mr. Musk, who channeled his libertarian impulses and
resentment of regulatory oversight of his vast business holdings into a
singular position of influence.
Without ceding control of his
companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides
inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure. Already, his
Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has inserted itself into more
than 20 agencies, The New York Times has found.
Mr. Musk’s strategy has been
twofold. His team grabbed control of the government’s human resources agency,
the Office of Personnel Management, commandeering email systems to pressure
civil servants to quit so he could cull the work force. And it burrowed into
computer systems across the bureaucracy, tracing how money was flowing so the
administration could choke it off. So far, Musk staff members have sought
access to at least seven sensitive government databases, including internal
systems of the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk’s transformation of DOGE
from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the
Trump era. It involves wild experimentation and an embrace of severe
cost-cutting that Mr. Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an
appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with
President Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable.
In reporting how Mr. Musk and his
allies executed their plan, The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people,
including DOGE workers, friends of Mr. Musk’s, White House aides and
administration officials who are dealing with the operation from the inside.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, many described a culture of secrecy
that has made them afraid to speak publicly because of potential retaliation.
Mr. Musk’s stealth approach stunned
both Democrats and civil servants. Failing to imagine an incursion from inside
the bureaucracy, they were caught essentially defenseless.
The Times has learned new details
about how the operation came together after the election, mapped out in a
series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early
intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.
Seasoned conservative operatives
like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the
workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a
little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service,
which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers —
including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other
companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done.
They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they
could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies
fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then
decipher how to break it apart.
They would call it the U.S. DOGE
Service, and they would not even have to change the initials.
They began their move on the digital
service unit earlier than has previously been reported, The Times found, while
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office — giving them the ability to
operate on Mr. Trump’s first day.
Around the time that Mr. Musk
identified the office as a key part of his strategy late last year, the Trump
transition team gained a key ally on the inside. A U.S.D.S. veteran named Amy
Gleason rejoined its staff as a senior adviser at the end of the Biden
administration, described to other employees as someone who would aid the Trump
transition. Ms. Gleason, who would later be named the acting administrator of
the Department of Government Efficiency, recommended that the unit bring aboard
several young engineers who would later become part of Mr. Musk’s team.
Allies of Mr. Musk, meanwhile,
fanned out across the government as part of the transition, extracting
intelligence about computer systems, contracts and personnel.
The team is now moving faster than
many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard
to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s
associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up
contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress:
the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A month into Mr. Trump’s second
term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords
they could ever need.
His swift success has been fueled by
the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal
government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered
that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to
design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
“President Trump’s brilliant idea to
create a Department of Government Efficiency remains overwhelmingly popular
with the American people, and there is no one better on the planet to oversee
this effort than Elon Musk,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,
said in a statement.
She declined to answer specific
questions about The Times’s reporting, but added that Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and
the cabinet “are working together to identify waste, fraud and abuse, and have
already saved taxpayers billions of dollars.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to a
request for comment.
An Alignment With Trump
At three pro-Trump dinners organized
by Mr. Musk and the billionaire investor Nelson Peltz over the course of 2024,
Mr. Musk touted the need for a smaller government but struggled to offer
specific ideas.
At the time, he was infuriated by
Mr. Biden and what he saw as deliberate efforts by the administration to harm
his businesses Tesla and SpaceX.
By the time Mr. Trump took the stage
at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, Mr. Musk saw him as his only
hope. Immediately after a bullet fired by a would-be assassin grazed Mr.
Trump’s ear, coming within an inch of possibly killing him, Mr. Musk endorsed
him in a post on X. In the months that followed, he would plow almost $300
million into efforts to re-elect Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Musk also quickly seeded the
idea with Mr. Trump that he could be more than just a campaign donor.
His first public mention of what would
evolve into the Department of Government Efficiency came less than three weeks
later. More than an hour into a lengthy Aug. 2 podcast with the interviewer Lex
Fridman, Mr. Musk began musing about what he saw as overregulation hampering
human progress.
“I wish you could just, like, for a
week, go into Washington,” Mr. Fridman said, proposing that his counterpart
make “government smaller.”
“I have discussed with Trump the
idea of a government efficiency commission,” Mr. Musk replied. “And I would be
willing to be part of that commission.”
Eleven days later, Mr. Musk hosted
Mr. Trump for a live audio discussion on X, using the power of the platform he
owned to champion his preferred candidate. Mr. Musk once again raised his idea
of a “government efficiency commission” to ensure that taxpayer money was
“spent in a good way.”
“I’d love it,” Mr. Trump said.
The national debt grew by roughly $8
trillion during Mr. Trump’s first term. Privately, he had told allies in 2020
that in “year five” of his presidency — which in his mind would be 2021 — he
would begin tackling the debt crisis.
Since then, Mr. Trump has become
more fixated on the debt; he has told advisers that America could be on the
verge of a “1929” moment, his shorthand for another Great Depression. He has
described Mr. Musk as a “genius” and said that if anyone could tackle this
problem, it was the world’s richest man.
As the summer went on, Mr. Musk
continued to toy with the idea. On Aug. 19, he responded to an account on X
suggesting that he name the proposed organization the Department of Government
Efficiency. Its abbreviation, DOGE, was a reference to Dogecoin, a meme
cryptocurrency that the billionaire had joked about for years, sometimes
causing wild fluctuations in its price.
“That is the perfect name,” Mr. Musk
replied on X.
By Sept. 5, the idea was announced
as a central pillar of Mr. Trump’s economic proposals. In a speech at the
Economic Club of New York, Mr. Trump, who by then was the Republican nominee,
said he would create a government efficiency commission helmed by Mr. Musk. The
effort, which Mr. Trump offered few details about at the time, would “save
trillions of dollars,” he claimed.
The idea gathered momentum in the
month before the election. The billionaire Howard Lutnick, who was running Mr.
Trump’s transition operation and would later become his commerce secretary,
envisioned the endeavor as a partnership between him and Mr. Musk, visiting him
in Texas in October to discuss the project.
Mr. Lutnick told associates at the
time that Mr. Musk would cut $1 trillion of waste out of the budget and that
Mr. Lutnick would earn $1 trillion for the United States through tariffs, the
closing of tax loopholes and a more aggressive capitalization of America’s
natural resources and hard assets. Together those efforts would make up $2
trillion and eliminate the federal deficit.
But Mr. Musk’s concept of the
Department of Government Efficiency was still quite unformed. A little more
than a week before the election, at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, the
billionaire muddled Mr. Lutnick’s specifics by combining the cutting and
revenue-raising portions of the effort. In front of a raucous crowd, Mr.
Lutnick asked the world’s richest man how much he thought he could eliminate
from the federal budget.
“Well, I think we can do at least $2
trillion,” Mr. Musk replied.
A Plan Takes Shape
Mr. Musk was elated by Mr. Trump’s
win, but he had done virtually no preparation for his new initiative. Two days
after the election, on Nov. 7, Mr. Musk was in the tearoom at Mar-a-Lago, Mr.
Trump’s home and members-only club in Palm Beach. He would spend much of the
next two months there, staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage on the property.
In the days and weeks that followed,
a tight circle began planning how to swiftly upend the bureaucracy, starting
essentially from scratch. The group included Mr. Musk; Mr. Ramaswamy, who was
then DOGE’s co-leader; Mr. Lutnick; and a health care entrepreneur, Brad Smith,
who had worked with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during the first Trump
term. Mr. Smith was a close business associate of Ms. Gleason, who had worked
at one of his companies as a chief product officer.
Mr. Musk had still not figured out
the legal structure for his effort or how it would work. He and Mr. Ramaswamy
hurriedly tried to answer fundamental questions, pressure-testing ideas with
prospective cabinet members and budget experts.
It was “spaghetti against the wall,”
according to one person in touch with Mr. Musk at the time.
In the first week after the
election, Mr. Smith gave Mr. Musk a presentation that amounted to a basic
budget and civics lesson, explaining how Congress appropriated funds and noting
major line items like defense and health care.
Mr. Smith weeks earlier had sold a
company for almost $3 billion, but he would struggle to earn Mr. Musk’s
respect. Mr. Musk wanted to staff the effort with loyal lieutenants, and viewed
Mr. Smith as someone he had inherited.
In one early meeting, Mr. Musk said
Mr. Smith was being too careful and offering “classic consultant stuff.” In
discussions, Mr. Musk expressed impatience with Mr. Smith’s caution that the
team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and
regulations. Mr. Musk wanted to tear down the government to the studs, and saw
Mr. Smith’s approach as incremental.
The people, he said, voted for
radical change. When someone asked at one point how Mr. Musk decided how to
fire people at Twitter, he said he tried “to figure out who you can’t live
without.” “Who are the people we have to keep?” Mr. Musk said.
The group at Mar-a-Lago brainstormed
ways to terminate federal workers. One idea was to motivate them to quit, by
forcing them to return to the office five days a week or, as Mr. Ramaswamy
suggested, moving civil servants to work on administration priorities like
border security. Mr. Ramaswamy predicted to the team that many federal workers
would not want to be part of an immigration crackdown and would leave
government — a win-win situation.
They discussed the likelihood of
litigation and welcomed the idea that Democrats would sue them. They liked
their chances with a Supreme Court that Mr. Trump had transformed in his first
term, with a majority that now favored an expansive vision of executive power.
The planning mirrored Mr. Musk’s tactics during his takeover at Twitter, when
his lieutenants rushed layoffs and said they were willing to risk lawsuits from
former employees.
Mr. Trump had announced the
Department of Government Efficiency on Nov. 12 as an entity outside of government,
but Mr. Musk quickly began to see problems with that — including the fact that
it could be subject to public-record rules.
He was also intent on getting access
to federal data and payment systems. He felt that if he could not, the whole
endeavor would be a waste of his time.
Several people involved in the talks
were familiar with the White House digital office, including Mr. Smith, who had
worked with the unit on a Covid database as a senior official in the first
Trump administration. Mr. Musk was indifferent when the notion of taking it
over was first floated, but warmed to the idea.
Eventually, Mr. Musk’s team settled
on a plan but kept it a secret for weeks, even blindsiding some people working
with him.
The operation would take over the
U.S. Digital Service, which had been housed within the Office of Management and
Budget, and would become a stand-alone entity in the executive office of the
president. Mr. Musk would not be named the DOGE administrator, but rather an
adviser to Mr. Trump in the White House.
An advantage of this complicated
structure was secrecy. For all his talk about “transparency,” Mr. Musk was
obsessed with confidentiality and fearful of leaks. If people filed lawsuits
seeking disclosure of his emails or the operation’s records under the Freedom
of Information Act, the arrangement would set the administration up to argue
that such documents were exempt. In contrast with agencies like the Office of
Management and Budget, FOIA does not apply to a president’s White House
advisers or to White House entities that advise him but wield no formal power,
like the National Security Council.
As he developed his strategy, Mr.
Musk drew guidance on how the executive branch operates from Mr. Trump’s senior
adviser Mr. Miller and his wife, Katie. The Millers had worked with Mr. Musk in
between Mr. Trump’s terms, helping to guide his political spending behind the
scenes. After the election, they became even more essential in helping him
decode and navigate Mr. Trump’s world.
Mr. Musk also absorbed as much as he
could about the budget process and the bureaucracy that he intended to
dismantle from Mr. Vought, who had served as director of the powerful Office of
Management and Budget in Mr. Trump’s first term.
Mr. Vought was seen as radioactive
by some in Mr. Trump’s inner circle because of his association with the
unpopular conservative initiative Project 2025. He was not on the initial list
of people under consideration to be budget director — a list populated by
corporate finance types.
But Mr. Vought and Mr. Musk hit it
off when they met, along with Mr. Ramaswamy, at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 14. They
were on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action
possible. Eight days later, Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Vought would return as
his director of the Office of Management and Budget.
For his part, Mr. Ramaswamy kept
focusing on deregulation, envisioning the Department of Government Efficiency
as an entity that would exist outside the government and could take advantage
of recent Supreme Court rulings to push huge rollbacks.
But Mr. Musk had scant interest in
constitutional law. He was constantly pushing the team to be “radical.”
Mr. Musk mused in one meeting about
shutting down an entire agency. He suggested the Education Department, which
Mr. Trump had himself vowed to eliminate. And Mr. Ramaswamy raised the idea of
functionally shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by choking
off its funds — a move that he told the group would be legally defensible
because the agency receives funding from the Federal Reserve, rather than
appropriations from Congress.
Both would later come under immense
pressure from Mr. Musk’s operation.
The Takeover
On Nov. 14, the Department of
Government Efficiency put out a recruiting call on X: Mr. Musk and Mr.
Ramaswamy were looking for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries
willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” The DOGE inbox
was flooded by thousands of direct messages.
By late November, Mr. Musk’s allies
were working out of the Trump transition office in West Palm Beach,
interviewing candidates for government jobs. Executive orders that would give
the operation its expansive powers were drafted by several people, with a
former Trump staff secretary, Derek Lyons, and a former Trump administration
lawyer, James Burnham, working in tandem on most of them.
(Mr. Ramaswamy would eventually
leave the effort to run for governor in Ohio, endorsed by Mr. Trump and Mr.
Musk.)
To help execute the strategy, Mr.
Musk turned to Mr. Davis, the cost-cutting adviser who had worked for Mr. Musk
for two decades at his tunnel construction venture the Boring Company, as well
as SpaceX and X, where he oversaw aggressive layoffs and cuts.
Mr. Musk told a group at Mar-a-Lago
that nobody in the world was better than Mr. Davis at dismantling something
that needed to be torn apart — though he acknowledged that he might not be the
right person to build an organization back up.
“Steve is like chemo,” Mr. Musk said
during one planning meeting. “A little chemo can save your life; a lot of chemo
could kill you.”
Mr. Davis, who was in charge of DOGE
operations, spent much of the transition in Washington, vetting prospective
staff. Mr. Musk also personally interviewed some applicants, often over video chats.
The candidates went through a process of engineering tests, background checks
and logic puzzles managed by Baris Akis, an investor close to Mr. Musk who
specializes in headhunting.
Among those who heeded the call late
last year was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern from Nebraska.
He resembled the ideal Musk candidate: libertarian and a precocious coder who
dropped out of college to receive a grant from Peter Thiel, the billionaire
investor and Trump supporter.
In December, he began telling people
he would probably be working for Mr. Musk.
Around that same time, Ms. Gleason,
a former civil servant and executive at Mr. Smith’s Nashville-based company,
arrived at the White House digital office. To some there, she was a familiar
face, having worked at the tech unit for three years during the first Trump
administration and at the beginning of Mr. Biden’s term.
When she returned late last year,
some staff members were told Ms. Gleason would aid the Trump transition.
On Dec. 17, Mr. Farritor submitted
an application — not to the Trump transition, but to the Biden administration —
to work at the digital office.
The application included only one
sentence. “Super passionate about serving my country in the U.S.D.S.!” he
wrote, according to documents seen by The Times.
His outreach confused some staff
members at the digital services unit. It was not clear to them why someone
would be applying with just weeks left of the Biden administration, and with
such a lackadaisical submission. Days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the
office rejected Mr. Farritor.
He was one of at least three
applicants to the digital unit in the final weeks of the Biden presidency who
were recommended by Ms. Gleason, drawing the attention of some of her
colleagues. She would describe these engineers to a friend as smart but
uninformed about how government worked.
None of the candidates Ms. Gleason
referred to U.S.D.S. were hired immediately. But after Mr. Trump’s
inauguration, they were swiftly brought aboard as members of the rebranded U.S.
DOGE Service, including Mr. Farritor, who ultimately gained entry to agencies
across the government.
Ms. Gleason herself would eventually
be named to a key role: the acting administrator of the Department of
Government Efficiency.
Allies of Mr. Musk also began
arriving at tech hubs in the federal government before Inauguration Day — the
first hint of the scope of his incursion.
Mr. Davis initially showed up at the
White House digital office as part of the transition “landing team.” Staff
members — some of whom had worked in previous administrations, including the
first Trump term — offered to help identify new hires. But Mr. Davis said the
group he was working with had its own recruiters — a statement the employees
took as a sign that he and his associates were looking for loyalty to Mr. Trump
and Mr. Musk.
Mr. Davis also began meeting with
leaders of the General Services Administration, which oversees the government’s
property portfolio and would later emerge as a key base for Mr. Musk’s efforts.
Some of the requests from the
incoming Trump officials who were part of the transition seemed odd at the time
to career officials, and have made sense only in retrospect.
Several agencies involved in
taxation or spending — the Office of Management and Budget, the I.R.S. and the
Social Security Administration, among others — received expansive lists of
questions from the transition teams, some so aggressive that they struck
officials at one agency as if they were discovery demands in litigation. Some
lists of questions exceeded a dozen pages.
The queries covered everything from
personnel to pending executive orders to in-depth budget data to how much
access officials had to government payment systems.
Trump transition aides showed up at
the Treasury Department in December, asking to see source code for the closely
guarded payment system that processes trillions of dollars every year. At the
time, they were introduced as part of the transition team, not as part of the
Department of Government Efficiency. They were rebuffed — but would return
again and gain access after the inauguration as part of DOGE.
The Blitz Begins
Inauguration week arrived with
frigid temperatures in Washington. As the city focused on Mr. Trump’s return,
Mr. Musk was already moving into place. His new hires moved into offices in the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. When career
staff arrived that week, they found Post-it notes marking rooms that had been
claimed for the Department of Government Efficiency.
One of Mr. Trump’s first acts in
office was to sign an executive order creating the entity and taking over the
White House digital office — codifying the plan developed at Mar-a-Lago weeks
earlier. He also signed orders freezing federal hiring and certain categories
of spending, and authorized a plan to reduce the size of the federal work
force, putting in motion the kind of mass layoffs that Mr. Musk was eager to
push through.
Mr. Musk himself filed paperwork to
become a “special government employee,” a status that allows him to keep
private his financial disclosure form. A White House official has said that it
will not be released.
Mr. Trump’s aides cleared a space
for Mr. Musk to use on the second floor of the West Wing. But he found his
White House office cramped and unimpressive, dismissing it as a “hovel.” He
abandoned it for the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office
Building, a gilded set of rooms more to his taste. There, he installed a gaming
computer with a giant, curved screen and blinking LED lights, and decorated his
desk with a DOGE sign and a MAGA hat. He also had a DOGE T-shirt emblazoned
with a quote from one of his favorite movies, “Office Space”: “What would you
say you do here?”
Mr. Musk’s team shocked many civil
servants with the speed with which they seized the digital pipelines of the
federal bureaucracy. His staff immediately sought access to systems controlled
by the Office of Personnel Management, including several of its hiring systems
and the agency’s website. Some requested access to the agency’s cloud
infrastructure, working to build a system to send mass emails to federal
workers.
A swarm of young aides were brought
on board as part of the staff of the former White House digital office. Their
entry alarmed U.S.D.S. employees, many of whom said it felt like a hostile
takeover.
The new arrivals sat employees down
for brisk interviews about their projects, quizzing some about how they
perceived the Department of Government Efficiency and Mr. Musk — questions that
seemed designed to test their loyalty.
From their new perch, DOGE team
members rapidly deployed across the federal government. The day after Mr. Trump
was sworn in, Mr. Farritor was scheduled to be outfitted with a new laptop at
the Government Services Administration. The next week, he showed up at
U.S.A.I.D. as part of a group that worked to dismantle the agency from within.
Mr. Musk’s operation had identified
the global aid agency as a supposed area of wasteful spending before the
inauguration. After Mr. Trump ordered a freeze on foreign aid, Mr. Musk’s aides
believed that U.S.A.I.D. was still sending out money to fulfill preapproved
contracts — putting it in the cross hairs. It was one of the first agencies to
be upended.
Mr. Farritor would also have roles
at the Energy, Education and Health and Human Services Departments, as well as
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he would seek access to a
database that controls contracts and more than $1 trillion in annual payments.
In the following weeks, Mr. Musk’s
operation would reach nearly every piece of the federal government. He says it
is just getting started.
“This is our one & only chance
to restore democracy from the dictatorship of the bureaucracy,” Mr. Musk wrote
in a post on X this week. “It is now or never. It must be now.”" [1]
