Musk and Other DOGE Special Employees to Leave Government

Elon Musk and other top members of his “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is a subset of a White House IT team rather than a department, announced their impending departure as their time limit runs out.

Musk, “DOGE CEO” Steve Davis, adviser and spokesperson Katie Miller, and general counsel James Burnham will leave government as the end of the 130 day limit on their status as Special Government Employees approaches.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and largest donor to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, announced his departure a day after lambasting Republicans’ so-called Big Beautiful Bill for the budget which passed in the House and is now before the Senate. It will make deep cuts to public services and explode the national debt to $4 trillion in order to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, such as Musk. He wants the tax breaks but somehow expects to get them without increasing national debt.

Although DOGE started with an announced target of slashing $2 trillion from federal spending, it only claims to have slashed about $175 billion and can only verify less than half of that. It has done so by inflicting widespread trauma throughout the federal workforce and the general population, engaging in mass firings of workers, mass terminations of federal contracts and grants, and mass cutoffs of regulations and investigations. The costs it has racked up suggest the eventual “savings” will be only a fraction of the unverified claim.

Among DOGE’s staff cuts were enforcement agents in the Internal Revenue Service, staff at national parks, and other portions of government that generate more revenue than they cost. Max Stier, head of the Partnership for Public Service, says DOGE cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion to hire and train replacements. The IRS estimates DOGE has cost an additional $500 billion in lost tax revenue.

When Trump was inaugurated, 32 federal probes were underway into Musk’s businesses. Few, if any, have survived DOGE. Agencies that were investigating or had issued fines against one of Musk’s companies were especially viciously shredded.

Musk’s companies have gathered new federal contracts at a stunning pace. At the FAA, his Starlink satellite system has muscled its way in, attempting to take over Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to upgrade air traffic control communications to fiber optic lines. In Trump’s tariff spree, other countries have sometimes been pressured into using Musk’s Starlink satellite network as a condition required to get relief from tariffs.

Musk also used DOGE to invade federal databases, downloading treasure troves of sensitive data about his own businesses, competitors, regulators, citizens, immigrants, confidential agreements with other countries, and so on. Now that he has all that data and courts are increasingly declaring DOGE actions illegal, far beyond its authority, staying involved with DOGE would only be a legal liability.

He leaves DOGE operatives embedded in federal agencies throughout government, able to update his purloined data and continue to wreak havoc on his behalf. He also leaves billionaire Peter Thiel’s company Palantir entwined with them, using the merged data for such purposes as tracking down immigrants for deportation and developing expertise that use the data against citizens.

Palantir is deeply tied to the far right and is best known for building surveillance tools. With Musk’s help, it is now at the heart of an effort to build a monolithic central database on every American and USA immigrant, wiping away the firewalls between systems that have helped prevent the federal government from being able to become Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel 1984.

Musk destroyed the United States Agency for International Development. Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols calculates that Musk’s abrupt termination of so much international aid has killed about 300,000 people so far, most of them children. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reports about 1,500 babies are born HIV-positive each day due to Musk’s cutoff of their mothers’ treatment.

Public fury at Musk and his DOGE team has tanked his electric car and solar power business Tesla, which is the largest source of wealth for him. For example, sales in Europe overall are down by about half. In some European countries, Tesla sales are down more than 70%. Despite this, John Hyatt at Forbes estimates that Musk has gotten $170 billion richer from his involvement with Trump.

As Musk left the White House, the New York Times broke news that while he was there, he took drugs heavily, including ketamine, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms and Adderall. His ketamine use was reportedly so extreme that it damaged his bladder. He had a stash of up to 20 pills that he took regularly.

Click here for more about Musk’s reported drug use.

Click here for more about federal investigations into Musk or his businesses.