The Permanent Legacy of DOGE: How Elon Musk’s Initiative Reshaped U.S. Governance Forever

Since the start of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk’s brainchild, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has shifted shape repeatedly over its tenure. This constant evolution has sparked periodic claims that the group no longer exists at all—most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management, who asserted DOGE had vanished entirely.

But reports of DOGE’s death are greatly exaggerated. Many of its founding members now hold full-time positions across multiple federal agencies, and its core work is carried forward by the newly launched National Design Studio (NDS), led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, a close confidant of Musk.

Even if DOGE as a formal entity does not survive until 2026—the U.S. semiquincentennial, which was named as its original expiration date in the executive order that created it—the broader structural shift it set in motion will continue. From its launch, DOGE has served two core purposes, both of which are progressing steadily: dismantling the longstanding administrative state, and consolidating vast amounts of federal data to concentrate power firmly within the executive branch. Policy experts warn this pattern could outlive the current Trump administration, reshaping U.S. governance permanently.

“It has already rewritten the unwritten norms that separate legislative authority from executive power, simply by refusing to respect those boundaries in the first place,” says Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “This won’t necessarily be limited to Republican administrations. Future Democratic presidents will look at what DOGE pulled off and ask, ‘If they could do this, why can’t we?’”

DOGE’s earliest weeks were defined by a chaotic, fast-paced blitz across the federal bureaucracy. Small teams of DOGE operatives—including the now-infamous Edward “Big Balls” Coristine—were deployed to agency offices across Washington, where they demanded immediate high-level access to sensitive government data, fired long-tenured workers, and terminated existing contracts out of hand. While many of these moves were not just radical but arguably illegal under existing bureaucratic rules, they were always advancing a pre-existing policy agenda that the Trump administration had laid out long before taking office.

Core DOGE goals—slashing discretionary spending and drastically cutting the size of the federal workforce—had already been championed for years by figures like Vice President JD Vance, who called for the “de-Ba’athification” of the federal government back in 2021, and Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These priorities were also a central plank of the conservative Project 2025 agenda. DOGE did not invent these end goals; it delivered the means to achieve them. Its unique innovation was recognizing that controlling the technical infrastructure of government—something a small, coordinated team can pull off quickly—effectively equals controlling the entire government.

“There has never been another government unit given this much power to fundamentally upend entire federal agencies, with basically zero oversight,” Moynihan notes.

Under the U.S. Constitution, authority to create and fund federal agencies rests exclusively with Congress. But Trump and many of his closest allies, including Vought and Vance, adhere to what was until recently a fringe interpretation of U.S. governance: the unitary executive theory. This framework holds that the president, much like a corporate CEO, exercises near-total control over the entire executive branch—of which all federal agencies are a part—granting the office far more power than the vision laid out in the nation’s founding documents.

“The unitary executive theory has shaped almost everything DOGE has done across every agency it has touched,” says George Foote, outside general counsel for the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent non-profit funded by Congress. Even though USIP was established as an independent body, the Trump administration has asserted it falls under the executive branch and therefore should be brought under DOGE’s control. “DOGE was clearly a tool that White House and OMB officials used to impose that kind of top-down control,” Foote adds.

Framing its work as a push for efficiency and technological innovation, and granted access to all unclassified executive branch systems under the terms of its founding executive order, DOGE was able to spread across the federal government rapidly, pushing through many of the administration’s top policy priorities quickly.

“They told everyone they wanted to bring artificial intelligence and advanced computing capabilities to government, and there is actually a lot of room for that kind of improvement in the federal bureaucracy,” Foote says. “But at USIP and many other agencies we’ve looked at, that was just a cover. It was pure pretense. Their real goal was to smash existing systems apart.”

In response to requests for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said: “President Trump pledged to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated federal government, and this administration is fully committed to delivering on that promise to the American people.”

DOGE centered its early work on gaining access to sensitive core government systems, such as the payment processing infrastructure at a Treasury Department agency, which is normally run exclusively by non-partisan career federal employees, as a tool to advance the administration’s political goals. WIRED first reported in February that DOGE operative Marko Elez gained access to Treasury systems within the first two weeks of the Trump administration taking office. At the same time, other DOGE operatives were granted access to multiple federal payroll systems across the government.

In March, WIRED reported that gaining access to Treasury’s payment systems was part of DOGE and the administration’s preliminary plan to cut off all funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Rather than going through Congress—the only branch of government with the legal authority to create or close an agency—DOGE’s approach allowed the administration to act immediately, no congressional questions or approval required.

With access to servers that allowed them to send mass emails to every federal employee, DOGE operatives sent out widespread blasts demanding workers explain what their job entailed, and asking for mass resignations across the bureaucracy. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, then-DOGE operative Sahil Lavingia built an artificial intelligence tool to sort through (“munch”) thousands of existing contracts and flag which ones should be terminated. “They were cutting contracts and firing people. Full stop,” Foote says.

At the Social Security Administration (SSA), a DOGE team attempted to add living immigrants to the agency’s so-called “master death file,” a move that would effectively deactivate their Social Security numbers and cut off their benefits.

“You just go into the data systems, you access the payroll systems, you map out where all contract payments go, and you take control of those levers,” Moynihan explains. “From there, you can just stop people from getting paid, you can eliminate a contract, or you can pull together different data sets from across agencies. This is a completely different way of operating than even seasoned conservative bureaucratic operators like Russ Vought or Stephen Miller used in past administrations.”

DOGE teams also began the unprecedented process of combining disconnected datasets stored across dozens of agencies into centralized repositories, a move authorized by a separate executive order. In April, WIRED reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was building a master national database that pulls in data from the SSA, at least two state voter rolls, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Shortly after the report, DHS confirmed DOGE assisted in the database’s creation—all without completing the legally required documentation for the project.

According to a whistleblower disclosure filed by former SSA chief data officer Chuck Borges, DOGE operatives copied the entire sensitive Numerical Identification System (NUMIDENT) database, which holds records of Social Security claims and personal identifiable information for every American, and stored the copy in a cloud environment “that apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”

“I have no doubt that the push for data consolidation that is a top priority of this administration is directly tied to DOGE, and it will be one of DOGE’s most lasting legacies,” says Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). CREW is representing multiple plaintiffs, including naturalized U.S. citizens, who are suing the federal government over the unlawful sharing of sensitive personal information across agencies. “Just running roughshod over legal requirements and violating existing law is no way to govern a constitutional democracy,” Sus adds.

When Musk left his formal role in the administration in May, DOGE’s public, high-intensity operations appeared to wind down. There were no more unannounced raids of agency offices or overnight demands for access to sensitive data. But the work DOGE started has continued uninterrupted.

On the administrative side, contracts are still being terminated at a steady clip, and Vought continues to push—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to fire thousands more career federal employees. The DHS centralized database for tracking immigrants has only been formalized and expanded since DOGE’s slowdown. There is no evidence that the copied NUMIDENT database has been removed or had access restrictions added. Though a federal judge ruled that the rapid dismantling of USAID “likely violated the United States Constitution,” the agency remains in limbo, neither fully operational nor formally shuttered. (Notably, deep cuts to USAID were already a core part of Project 2025’s blueprint for the agency.)

Similarly, despite a federal judge ruling that DOGE’s takeover of USIP was “unlawful,” the organization’s headquarters has been renamed after President Trump, and most of its original staff remain barred from entering the building. “What happened at USIP is a transition from DOGE acting as a wrecking team to the changes becoming an institutionalized part of the government, folded into the State Department and the White House’s foreign policy operation,” Foote says. “It’s completely contrary to the USIP Act and completely out of step with everything the organization was created to do.”

Moynihan says DOGE’s actions will likely permanently alter the structure of the U.S. federal government. “There will be a whole host of additional ramifications in specific policy areas that come from just the massive loss of institutional capacity within the government,” he says. “I think we’re looking at somewhere around 200,000 employees leaving the federal government by the end of this term.” Researchers have already estimated that the disruption to USAID has led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths around the globe.

For his part, Sus says there are pathways to reverse the damage DOGE has caused, but it will require extraordinary effort. “While we believe this damage is fixable, it will take a significant amount of work to undo,” Sus says. “And it will require consistent, significant diligence from future executive branch officials, as well as action from the courts, to fix what has been broken.”