President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has disbanded, eight months earlier than expected, Reuters reported Monday morning.
The agency was set up in January to cut government waste and shrink federal agencies, which resulted in job loss for tens of thousands of federal workers.
Director of the Office of Personnel Management Scott Kupor told Reuters that DOGE “doesn’t exist,” adding that most of the department’s functions have been absorbed by his office.
Reuters reporter Courtney Rozen, who first broke this story, joined WTOP anchor Mark Lewis to discuss the end of DOGE.
Read or listen to the interview below:
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
- Mark Lewis:
Courtney, thanks for joining us on WTOP. So what has happened? Why did DOGE disband its work early?
- Courtney Rozen:
What we know is that Scott Kupor, who is the director of Office of Personnel Management — that’s a fancy word for the government’s HR director — said on the record for the first time that DOGE had disbanded. We had seen it start to fizzle out over the last couple months, but we hadn’t seen firm, on the record, say that that’s true, and this is for the first time, him saying that.
- Mark Lewis:
Now, let’s look at what they accomplished. What is the report card on DOGE? Did it accomplish its mission?
- Courtney Rozen:
Depends on who you ask. I know that’s an unsatisfying answer, but what we know is about 317,000 people are expected to leave government by the end of this year. That’s a good chunk of the federal workforce, and one of the goals of DOGE was to downsize.
We’ve also seen that some of the DOGE staff are now working at federal agencies, and so they are still working on some of those goals, which are making government agencies more efficient and downsizing them.
- Mark Lewis:
What about government spending? I’ve seen some reports suggesting that DOGE may have overestimated the amount of money that the government was saving or the amount of money that had been cut from spending. What can you tell us about that?
- Courtney Rozen:
DOGE hasn’t been transparent about how it did its accounting, how it came up with those figures of what savings were done. So we don’t fully know whether their assertions are true or false, because we don’t have the information behind them to verify that.
- Mark Lewis:
So at this point, in terms of what federal workers can expect moving forward, is the effort to downsize continuing in some other way, or are they essentially closing the book now on that?
- Courtney Rozen:
Federal workers should expect there to be a lot of “no’s” around hiring. The hiring freeze was part of the whole federal workforce change part of the Trump administration. That is over, the hiring freeze, but they’re still having to go through a lot of layers to fill jobs.
So all those jobs, the 317,000 people left or expecting to leave by the end of the year, replacing them is going to be really hard. In terms of downsizing, Congress passed a law that says there can be no more layoffs in the federal workforce through Jan. 30. So through then, we shouldn’t expect to see any more, but after that, it’s possible we will.
- Mark Lewis:
Well, Elon Musk was the figurehead of DOGE, and when the year started, it certainly was the next step in the relationship with President Trump. We know things soured over the course of the first few months. Where do things stand between them now, in terms of their relationship and friendship?
- Courtney Rozen:
Elon Musk was in Washington last week. He was there to have dinner with the Saudi crown prince. That was the first time we had seen him in public appear near the president or around the president. So we’re starting to see that breakup thaw a bit, and we’ll be watching it closely to see what happens next.
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