This week in DOGE: Elon Musk’s role in overhauling ‘America, Inc.’

We’ll be recapping what you need to know every Friday morning for the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Get more updates and analysis in the NPR Politics newsletter.

As President Trump seeks to roll back the size, scope and spending of the federal government, a key figure in those plans has been tech billionaire Elon Musk. Musk leads the Department of Government Efficiency, an idea conceived as an outside review of how the government operates but has now become an entity based inside the White House with virtually unfettered access to federal agencies and wide-ranging permission to eviscerate purchases, programs and staff to achieve its goals.

As we outlined last Friday, DOGE has had a busy few weeks, encouraging federal workers to resign, pushing for the shutdown of USAID — responsible for doling out about half of U.S. foreign aid — and accessing agencies’ records, including sensitive payment information at Treasury. And this week’s pace was no different. So let’s sift through the continued onslaught of headlines: about how the world’s richest man is wielding the power given to him by Trump to help remake the United States, the lack of transparency into his actions and the ongoing concerns that his companies stand to benefit from many changes.

Appearing virtually Thursday morning at the 2025 World Governments Summit in Dubai wearing a “tech support” shirt, Musk said he’s helping what he called “America, Inc.” engage in a sort of “corporate turnaround” that should include deleting entire agencies.

“It’s kind of like leaving a weed: If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back,” he said. “But if you remove the roots of the weed it doesn’t stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it harder.”

This week in Musk and DOGE:

• Musk appeared in the Oval Office Tuesday alongside the president, giving extended remarks about DOGE and answering questions from reporters. NPR’s Elena Moore has more on the appearance, where Trump also signed an executive order outlining how federal agencies should implement the DOGE-led reduction in force for federal agencies.
• At least some of that reduction is already underway: NPR reporters have confirmed the first round of layoff notices are being sent out, appearing to target employees who were recently hired and still on probationary status. Compensation for federal employees amounted to around 3 percent of the federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year, according to government data.
• A federal judge declined to block the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program for federal workers, which the Office of Personnel Management sent late last month to 2 million federal employees with a subject line of “A Fork in the Road,” NPR’s Andrea Hsu reports. The plan, including the “fork” metaphor, largely mirrors Musk’s efforts to drastically reduce the number of employees at the social media site Twitter, now called X, after he took over.
• Speaking of X, Musk’s company announced last month it would partner with Visa to offer a mobile payments service called the “X Money Account” that would be regulated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Now, NPR’s Bobby Allyn writes, the CFPB is one of the next agencies set to be essentially dismantled by DOGE. Acting Director Russ Vought ordered employees to halt nearly all work, as Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on his X account last week. It’s one of many examples that highlights how Musk’s extensive business with the federal government through his private companies could conflict with his aggressive dismantling of federal agencies on behalf of President Trump.
• The cessation of work at the CFPB has added to the avalanche of lawsuits that have been filed in the first weeks of Trump’s new administration against DOGE efforts and the president’s radical reshaping of the federal bureaucracy. A union representing federal employees says the directive to not work is unlawful, and filed a second suit arguing DOGE access to CFPB systems violates the Privacy Act. Thursday, a judge paused the Trump administration’s plan to put thousands of staffers for the U.S. Agency for International Development on paid leave.
• Elsewhere in the legal system, federal judges have halted DOGE access to sensitive Treasury payment systems, ordered federal health agencies to restore websites and datasets that were abruptly pulled down, found the administration is improperly freezing some federal funding and returned the government’s top whistleblower advocate to his role after Trump allegedly illegally fired him. As federal agencies prepare for Trump’s reduction in force plan carried out by DOGE, NPR’s Shannon Bond and Jenna McLaughlin report that the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate and contracts, plans to slash its budget in half and ramp up monitoring of remaining staff — a model that might soon be deployed across most of the rest of the federal government.
• Amid the dizzying speed and scope of these changes, Musk said during his Oval Office conversation that DOGE’s work was “maximally transparent.” But there’s little transparency and some exaggeration surrounding the claims of the billions of dollars saved in less than a month. You can read my analysis of several public data sources, including USASpending.gov and the Federal Procurement Data System, that finds errors, omissions and lingering questions about the accuracy and scale of the massive savings claimed by DOGE in recent days.