A dirge for DOGE

Few would disagree with the notion that President Donald Trump is rather malleable on issues of policy and political alliances. Friends and enemies swap places with surprising regularity. Must-pass initiatives become rejected agendas just as quickly.

As visual evidence of this, consider two scenes.

Back in February 2025, the president hosted a chummy joint press conference in the Oval Office with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who outlined his plans to slash the federal government to the bone via his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Then, just last week, Trump hosted another amicable joint press conference where his guest was the self-described socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who plans on making New York City great again with tax hikes on billionaires like Musk to fund billions in new social spending.

The president was rather unembarrassed when pressed by reporters on his willingness to host someone whom he described as a dangerous communist just a few weeks ago.

“We all change. I changed a lot, changed a lot from when I first came to office,” said Trump at last week’s press conference.

While DOGE did not come up in the president’s press conference with Mamdani, their friendly Q&A helps to bookend the sunsetting of his administration’s signature state-slashing initiative.

Reuters reported yesterday that DOGE no longer exists. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told the news outlet that the agency has been disbanded as a standalone entity. Former DOGE staffers have been transferred to another executive initiative tasked with beautifying government websites.

The DOGE effort to dismantle, reform, and streamline the entire federal government started with such a bang. It’s now sunsetting with barely a whimper.

Numerous retrospectives on DOGE’s success have been written since Musk, the animating force behind the initiative, left the White House on less-than-amicable terms several months ago.

Its official closure provides another opportunity to assess what, if any, success it had, and whether (as the Mamdani press conference might indicate) we’ve fully transitioned into a new phase of this second Trump administration: one interested in growing government, instead of shrinking it.

Given its quiet slide into irrelevance, it’s important to remember that DOGE began as the signature initiative of the Trump White House. Its ambitious remit included closing the federal deficit, eliminating whole departments, zeroing out unauthorized regulation, and upgrading the federal government’s “tech stack.”

As I detail in the latest issue of Reason, DOGE mostly failed at these goals.

The most glaring disparity between promises and reality was DOGE’s impact on federal spending. Musk’s agency went from promising potentially trillions in spending cuts to claiming hundreds of billions in savings from canceled grants and contracts.

Almost all of those cuts proved illusory. What we were left with was a small $9 billion rescission package codifying cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting. The federal government is on track to spend more, not less, during Trump’s second term.

High hopes that DOGE would completely remake the federal government’s I.T. infrastructure have also come to naught.

The Trump administration’s record on deregulation is salutary. More regulatory costs are being eliminated than added, although this elimination of red tape has generally come from agencies themselves rather than DOGE specifically.

The one area where DOGE has arguably fulfilled its mission is in reducing federal headcount. While the government shutdown and consequent delay in federal jobs reporting obscure DOGE’s full impact, the estimates we do have indicate a sizable drop in federal employment.

The Partnership for Public Service estimates that 211,000 civil servants (close to 10 percent of the entire federal workforce) have left federal employment via the Trump administration’s workforce reduction plans.

That count includes workers let go during the shutdown, many of whom are likely to get their jobs back as a result of language included in the continuing resolution that reopened the government.

Your mileage may vary on how laudatory you find his record of government cost cutting. My colleague Eric Boehm provided the “glass half empty” take here, which is well worth reading.

I confess to looking more positively on DOGE’s record. Not because I dispute any of the underlying numbers about its relatively minor impact on government operations. Rather, it’s because it outperformed any expectations I had about the Trump administration’s interest in cutting government at all.

Libertarian Party convention speeches notwithstanding, Trump has never pitched himself as a small government champion. His record during his second term has made this abundantly clear.

As Reason‘s new issue on “Republican socialism” details, his administration is increasingly embracing big government across the board.

That includes policies one might expect from a Republican administration, like masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. It also includes any number of big government initiatives that the pre-Trump Republican party of recent memory would at least be embarrassed about—from tariffs to the government taking equity stakes in private companies.

The libertarian moment, this is not.

Following the press conference with Mamdani, we can’t even rely on Trump’s reflexive anti-leftism to keep some of his administration’s interfering tentacles at bay.

The socialists of all parties are finding out they actually agree on a lot.

Given the increasingly dark and interventionist trajectory of the Trump administration, it’s hard not to have a little bit of nostalgia for the ever-so-brief DOGE era.

For a few short months, the White House’s primary focus was on what spending could be cut and which federal workers could more productively serve their country in the private sector.

Incompetent and slapdash as this effort was, it was at least stumbling in a more libertarian direction. Here was some evidence that anti-statism still had some role to play in the broader MAGA movement.

With the shuttering of DOGE now official, this transient and incomplete experiment in small government populism is definitively over. The high-water mark of what libertarians could hope for from the Trump administration has passed.

People aren’t wrong to bemoan DOGE’s failures. I, for one, am still sad that it’s gone. It’s passing portends an even more authoritarian turn in our national politics.