By Tim Reid
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to boast about his sweeping cuts to the federal bureaucracy during an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, with praise for tech billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump has given Musk and his DOGE team extraordinary power. In just six weeks entire government agencies have been dismantled and tens of thousands of workers fired. Critics, including a growing number of U.S. lawmakers, have voiced concerns about potential conflicts of interest between DOGE’s decisions and Musk’s business interests as CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla, space contractor SpaceX and social media platform X.
WHAT EXACTLY IS DOGE?
DOGE was created by an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office on January 20 to “modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
Despite its name, DOGE is not a government department created by an act of Congress. It is a temporary organization that took over an existing unit within the White House, the U.S. Digital Service. It appears to be accountable only to Trump.
Its mandate now far exceeds confines of the language of the initial executive order as its staffers sweep through government departments looking for spending and staff cuts.
The team is small, about 40 people, many of them young software engineers who are current and former employees in Musk companies. They have little to no experience inside the U.S. government.
Musk, the world’s richest person, does not draw a government salary and operates as a “special government employee,” the White House has said. It has been vague on Musk’s exact role in DOGE, although he is clearly overseeing the government overhaul.
Facing questions from judges over who exactly is in charge of the cost-cutting unit, the White House named Amy Gleason, a former healthcare executive, as acting administrator.
Musk has said his goal is to find $1 trillion in savings. The federal budget is set to reach about $7 trillion this year.
HAS DOGE SAVED MONEY?
According to its website, the only official window into its operations, DOGE says it had saved U.S. taxpayers $105 billion as of March 2 through a series of actions, including workforce reductions, asset sales, and contract cancellations.
Yet its savings total is unverifiable and its calculations have been riddled with errors and corrections.
In the “receipts” section of its website, DOGE has repeatedly deleted some of its biggest claims to taxpayer savings. For instance, it reported one $8 billion contract that turned out to be worth only $8 million.
Musk has said DOGE will correct mistakes when it finds them.
WHAT HAS DOGE DONE?
Musk’s team has taken a wrecking ball to parts of the federal bureaucracy, hollowing out some agencies and sowing panic among much of the 2.3 million-strong civilian government workforce.
To date, DOGE members have entered about 20 government agencies, gaining access to computer systems that contain personal data of past and present federal workers and millions more Americans.
Through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the U.S. government’s human resources arm, DOGE sent a buyout offer to government workers last month. About 75,000 have accepted.
It has fired or sent termination notices to at least 25,000 other government employees, starting with probationary workers, who have fewer legal protections. The next target is the bigger pool of veteran career civil servants.
Last month Trump signed another executive order ordering agency heads to work with DOGE to deliver plans by March 13 for “large-scale reductions” in the federal workforce.
Unions have filed more than two dozen lawsuits challenging mass firings and other Trump administration initiatives that impact the federal workforce, with mixed results so far.
A group of unions won a February 20 order temporarily blocking Musk’s government downsizing team from accessing sensitive data at the U.S. Department of Education. Judges in other cases have said unions likely lack legal standing to sue.
WHICH AGENCIES HAVE BEEN TARGETED?
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides a lifeline to the world’s needy, has been shuttered and thousands of its workers sent home.
Another agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from unscrupulous lenders, has also been shut down. Many CFPB employees received termination notices.
Among conflict-of-interest questions cited by critics, the CFPB has investigated claims about Tesla’s loan policies. DOGE has also moved into NASA, an agency where some of Musk’s companies have billions of dollars in government contracts.
Last week, U.S. lawmakers raised questions about whether Musk would interfere or take over a $2.4 billion Federal Aviation Administration telecommunications contract with rival Verizon. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said DOGE staff are on site at FAA.
Thousands of workers have been targeted for dismissal at federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides weather forecasting and climate data; the Social Security Administration (SSA), which provides benefits to retirees and the disabled; the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service; and the U.S. Forest Service, which manages millions of acres of national forests and grassland.
(Reporting by Tim Reid, additional reporting by Alexia Garamfalvi, editing by Ross Colvin and David Gregorio)
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