About a month after Donald Trump won a second term, as Republican hype surrounding the so-called Department of Government Efficiency reached absurd levels, Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman, an MSNBC contributor, spoke to a senior GOP aide with low expectations.
Referring to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, then the chairs of the fake “department,” the congressional staffer said: “Two people who know nothing about how the government works pretending they can cut a trillion dollars, both with decent pulpits to preach from, and the ear of an unpredictable president? Disaster.”
Seven weeks later, the relevance of that prediction continues to linger — because things could be better in DOGE Land.
As this week got underway, for example, Ramaswamy resigned from the advisory panel, and according to multiple reports, his colleagues weren’t exactly sad to see him leave. A few days later, as The Wall Street Journal reported, the fake “department” suffered another major departure.
The top lawyer at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said he is leaving just days after President Trump’s return to the White House. Bill McGinley, whom Trump appointed as DOGE’s legal counsel in December, is in discussions with several large companies to return to the private sector.
The lawyer confirmed his departure in an interview with the Journal, emphasizing that he remains supportive of the president and his agenda.
If McGinley’s name sounds at all familiar, it’s because Trump announced in December that the Republican lawyer would serve as the next White House counsel. Four weeks later, for reasons that were not disclosed to the public, Trump changed his mind, demoted McGinley and dispatched him to the DOGE endeavor — which McGinley is now leaving, just days after the new president’s inauguration.
Making matters worse, it’s not the only challenge facing the initiative:
- DOGE is the target of multiple lawsuits that allege the endeavor is failing to comply with disclosure and hiring laws that apply to all advisory panels.
- The so-called department is facing new questions as to why it was created in such a way that it’s not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
- While the stated purpose of the project was to identify wasteful spending, Musk has already walked back Trump’s unrealistic campaign promises, and the president’s executive order creating DOGE said its purpose will be to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” suggesting that the reason for the endeavor’s existence has already been overhauled.
Meanwhile, the “department” that was ostensibly created to address waste and fraud in federal spending is also already experiencing mission creep, reportedly contacting the U.S. Marshals Service this week to express concern about the speed with which pardoned Jan. 6 criminals were being released from detention.
In case that weren’t quite enough, a Wired magazine report noted that DOGE, at an institutional level, has been parked inside the executive branch by reorganizing and renaming an existing entity, the U.S. Digital Service, as the U.S. DOGE Service. That might not seem especially notable, but the Wired article added that this is a move “that will give centibillionaire Elon Musk and his allies seemingly unprecedented insight across the government, and access to troves of federal data.”
In other words, as the first week of Trump’s second term gets underway, the not-quite-real Department of Government Efficiency is both struggling and expanding its remit — which is far from an ideal scenario in an initiative clouded by secrecy.
The “disaster” prediction from December might’ve understated the case.