DOGE Isn’t Dead: OPM Chief Says Musk-Era Efficiency Drive Still Reshaping Government

by Emmitt Barry, with reporting from Washington D.C. Bureau Staff

(Worthy News) – The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have lost its high-profile founder, Elon Musk, but its mission is still running inside the federal bureaucracy, according to Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor.

Kupor pushed back Monday against reports that DOGE is “dead,” saying Reuters took his earlier comment out of context. While the department no longer operates as a centralized unit, he said, “the principles of DOGE remain alive and well,” including deregulation, rooting out fraud and waste, and reshaping the federal workforce.

The DOGE website has been quiet since August, but the program is still active on X–owned by Musk–where it claimed Sunday to have cut or narrowed 78 “wasteful” federal contracts totaling $1.9 billion. These included a $616,000 Health and Human Services contract for a “social media monitoring platform” and a $4.3 million IRS contract related to Inflation Reduction Act project management.

Musk departed his DOGE leadership role in May after 134 days and roughly $200 billion in cuts–far short of the $2 trillion he once predicted. Polls at the time showed voters divided, with many criticizing the blunt spending axe even as DOGE highlighted examples of questionable expenditures, such as $59 million FEMA spent on high-end hotel rooms for illegal immigrants in New York.

Kupor said many former DOGE staffers–mostly young engineers and private-sector executives–have been absorbed into other agencies or into OPM, where they are helping overhaul federal hiring. President Trump recently ordered agencies to submit plans to streamline recruitment, reduce reliance on contractors, and emphasize merit over bureaucracy.

According to OPM, the administration has already exceeded Trump’s mandate to cut four federal positions for every new hire. So far this year, 68,000 employees have joined the government while approximately 317,000 have departed.

Democrats remain sharply critical. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington called DOGE a “catastrophic failure,” accusing its spending cuts of undermining cancer research, humanitarian aid, and other essential government functions.

Latest Worthy News