DOGE may no longer be helmed by Elon Musk or even considered an official government entity anymore, but the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. The special advisory intended to eliminate government “waste, fraud, and abuse,” is still up to something, two federal employees told Fortune.
Last month, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reutersthat DOGE “doesn’t exist,” and is no longer a “centralized entity.” According to an executive order signed on President Donald Trump’s first day in office, DOGE as a temporary organization had been scheduled to end on July 4, 2026, suggesting the agency disbanded about eight months ahead of schedule.
Kupor later clarified DOGE’s current role in the federal government in an X post, saying, “The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under the [U.S. DOGE Service] But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen.”
Federal employees interviewed by Fortune, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak to the press, said it was not apparent to them that DOGE had been disbanded.
An Internal Revenue Services (IRS) employee told Fortune that DOGE “became a shell company” as more and more operatives from the temporary group became tangled in the oversight of individual government agencies.
“It’s like taking the dust jacket off of the book and saying, ‘We’ve got rid of the book,’” he said.
DOGE is still barking
The IRS employee confirmed to Fortune that the agency has been administering “coding tests” over the last few weeks, first reported by Wired, an addition to mandatory training required for certain employees. Per Wired, the tests were a directive from the Treasury Department’s chief information officer and DOGE operative Sam Corcos, and were administered through HackerRank, a tool used by private sector tech companies to assess coding and programming skills of prospective hires.
“The business case could be made that you want people who know their job thoroughly,” the IRS employee told Fortune of the purpose of the tests. “However, given the treatment that we’ve received over the past eight, nine months, I would say it’s more of another screening out of more people.”
Court documents from October indicate the Treasury Department has terminated approximately 1,446 employees since the start to Trump’s second term.
A National Institutes of Health (NIH) employee told Fortune the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, still has plenty of DOGE personnel, though they are now employees of the agency. Amy Gleason, whom Trump named acting administrator of DOGE, was appointed as an expert/consultant to the HHS’s Office of the Secretary in March.
The HHS likewise lists Clark Minor, DOGE operative and former Palantir software engineer, as the agency’s chief information officer and acting chief artificial intelligence officer. The agency announced earlier this month a Minor-led effort to integrate AI the HHS’s internal operations and research, in order to fulfill a directive from the Office of Management and Budget led by director and DOGE partner Russell Vought, to integrate technology for “improving internal operations, efficiency, and federal use.”
The NIH and IRS did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
DOGE’s lasting impact
DOGE’s sweeping changes have continued to impact the government’s productivity. For the IRS, December is usually a quiet month, when taxpayer call volumes are so low the agency’s servers can be shut down for routine maintenance, the agency employee said. This year, however, offices are so short-staffed as a result of DOGE-led layoffs that employees have been overwhelmed balancing taking calls with their other responsibilities. The IRS employee said his office has one-third of the workers it had about a year ago.
“This is going to be probably the roughest filing season we’ve had since the pandemic,” he said.
He said ongoing burnout from increased workloads has the potential to impact the quality of internal reviews.
“When we look back historically, we’re going to see that the gutting of the bureaucracy that keeps the government running, that keeps the country functional, will be the trigger that collapses America,” the employee said.
Musk, who was DOGE’s de facto leader as a special government employee earlier this year, had his own reservations about the group’s effectiveness. In an interview with conservative influencer Katie Miller, Musk said DOGE was only “somewhat successful,” claiming it saved the government between $100 billion and $200 billion in annual “zombie payments,” or spending on expired programs.
When Miller asked if Musk would go back and run DOGE all over again, Musk said, “I don’t think so.”
“Instead of doing DOGE, I would have, basically…worked on my companies,” he said.
If you’re a federal worker with a tip, or if you’d like to share your experience, please contact Sasha Rogelberg on Signal @sashrogel.13.
Politics8 years ago