Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has been quietly dismantled eight months before its mandate was due to expire, bringing to a close one of the defining projects of his second term without a formal announcement of its end.
The Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, was created by executive order in January 2025 with a charter running to July 2026 and a remit to streamline the federal bureaucracy, cut costs and accelerate deregulation. It sat within the Executive Office of the President and worked through small teams deployed into departments, alongside a revamped US Digital Service given wide access to unclassified government systems.
Confirmation that DOGE has effectively been disbanded came this month from Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Asked about the status of the department, he told Reuters: “That doesn’t exist,” adding that it was no longer a “centralised entity”. His comments are the first on-the-record acknowledgement from the administration that DOGE is no longer operating as a stand-alone body and that its work has been absorbed into other structures.
According to officials and internal documents cited in the same reporting, OPM – the federal government’s human resources arm – has taken over many of DOGE’s day-to-day functions, including the review of staffing levels and restructuring plans at agencies. Kupor also confirmed that a government-wide hiring freeze linked to DOGE in the early months of Trump’s second term has ended and that there is “no target around reductions” in the federal workforce, marking a clear break with the numerical goals that previously guided the initiative.
The move represents a shift from the highly visible rollout of DOGE in 2025. Trump placed Elon Musk at the head of the project, and the billionaire amplified its work on his X social media platform and at conservative gatherings. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Musk appeared on stage waving a customised chainsaw, describing it as a “chainsaw for bureaucracy” to symbolise planned cuts to government payrolls and programmes.
DOGE said it had delivered tens of billions of dollars in savings through cancelled contracts, staff reductions and changes to grants. Independent analysts, however, pointed out that the unit did not release a detailed public breakdown of those figures, making it difficult to verify the headline numbers or to distinguish DOGE-driven decisions from wider deficit-cutting measures adopted elsewhere in government.
Musk’s prominence in the project declined after a public falling-out with Trump in May. He has not appeared at official DOGE events since and has largely returned his attention to his business interests. Subsequent reports indicate that many senior DOGE staff resigned or moved into other federal roles over the summer, further weakening the department’s profile.
Several of those figures have re-emerged at the National Design Studio, a new unit established in August by executive order and led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia. The studio has been tasked with improving the “usability and aesthetics” of federal digital services and overseeing the redesign of thousands of government websites, effectively taking on part of DOGE’s digital modernisation agenda but without its explicit mandate to shrink the state.
Other former DOGE staff now occupy senior posts at major departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Naval Research and the State Department’s foreign assistance portfolio. At the same time, the White House budget office has asked Scott Langmack, previously DOGE’s liaison at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to develop artificial intelligence tools to scan federal regulations and identify candidates for repeal or revision, indicating that deregulatory work linked to DOGE continues in a different guise.
Republican-led states such as Idaho and Florida have also begun setting up their own efficiency offices modelled on DOGE’s tactics, including tighter hiring controls and central reviews of agency activities. That development means the department’s methods are likely to survive at state level even as the federal experiment winds down.
With DOGE now effectively wound up, Trump officials say the administration remains committed to reducing waste, fraud and abuse in federal programmes. In the absence of a dedicated department, the impact of that strategy will be measured less through one branded initiative and more through the cumulative effect of budget decisions, staffing levels and regulatory rollbacks across the federal government.
