The Daily Populous Tuesday November 25th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by arstechnica.com and submitted by Doener23

After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”

Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.

As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.

Under Musk, DOGE was hyped as planning to save the government a trillion dollars. On X, Musk bragged frequently about the agency, posting in February that DOGE was “the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this.”

The reality fell far short of Musk’s goals, with DOGE ultimately reporting it saved $214 billion—an amount that may be overstated by nearly 40 percent, critics warned earlier this year.

How much talent was lost due to DOGE cuts?

Once Musk left, confidence in DOGE waned as lawsuits over suspected illegal firings piled up. By June, Congress was drawn, largely down party lines, on whether to codify the “DOGE process”—rapidly firing employees, then quickly hiring back whoever was needed—or declare DOGE a failure—perhaps costing taxpayers more in the long term due to lost talent and services.

wedgie-p on November 24th, 2025 at 22:47 UTC »

Elon Musk IS THE FAT. The next democratic president better make sure that mfer never gets another federal dime. I don’t care if it sets back our space program. Fuck Elon Musk. I don’t want him to have a single red cent of my tax dollars.

Significant_Cup_238 on November 24th, 2025 at 22:40 UTC »

Career federal employee checking in, in my corner of the government, there is no fat. We bring our own fucking office supplies in because we're such damn penny pinchers.

Additional_Gur5577 on November 24th, 2025 at 22:35 UTC »

I'm glad they used the chainsaw photo, because that's exactly what this entire thing was: a publicity stunt. Pure theatrics. It was never about saving money or eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse. That would've required months of targeted studies and an examination of processes and policies. Musk, Trump, and the fanatical MAGA base have no patience for that.

No, DOGE was a combination of marketing the Trump administration as saving taxpayer money while allowing Project 2025 to lay waste to the federal workforce and eliminate vital programs and services that benefit the country in ways people are only just beginning to understand. DOGE was designed for news headlines and Truth Social posts. It was never designed to make the government more efficient.