by WorldTribune Staff, January 4, 2026 Real World News

When Elon Musk left Washington, DC and went back to the private sector, critics hailed it as the demise of the much-touted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“I certainly think Elon Musk leaving Washington took a lot of the wind out of the sails for the DOGE movement,” Dominik Lett, budget and entitlement policy analyst at the Cato Institute, told The Washington Times.

While DOGE never got close to Musk’s initial $2 trillion in federal spending he hoped to eliminate, that doesn’t mean the Trump Administration has abandoned ship on the DOGE idea. Far from it, actually.

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor noted: “DOGE may not have centralized leadership … but, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: deregulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; reshaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”

In a Jan. 1 analysis for The Washington Times, Susan Ferrechio noted that DOGE “has identified billions of dollars in wasteful spending, reduced the bloated federal workforce, and spurred a nationwide effort to streamline and economize government agencies.”

Among DOGE’s accomplishments:

• Eliminated the office of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had unfettered authority to distribute up to $50 billion annually in taxpayer money to programs in other countries.

• Exposed U.S. taxpayer money spent on drag shows in Colombia and Ecuador, transgender clinics in India and Guatemala, electric vehicles in Vietnam, and $122 million for groups aligned with foreign terrorist organizations.

• Drove a reduction in the federal workforce. Kupor said last month that 317,000 employees would leave the federal workforce by the end of 2025, offset by 68,000 new hires. That’s a net reduction of 249,000 workers.

• The IRS has shed more than 26,000 employees and aims to reduce the agency’s workforce to fewer than 60,000 employees. That would be a significant decrease from the more than 100,000 IRS workers during the Biden-Harris regime.

• DOGE announced on X in December that agencies had cut or reduced nearly 100 “wasteful” contracts that, if fully implemented, would have cost taxpayers more than $5 billion. The money had been directed to “develop a comprehensive strategic narrative and management approach aimed at the Human Centered Transformation and Enhanced Partnerships” and a Pentagon consulting contract for “strategic transformation and enterprise project support.”

• The DOGE initiative, led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, implemented significant reforms. It overhauled and modernized the federal government’s antiquated retirement system, which for decades was managed from 26,000 filing cabinets stored in a decommissioned Pennsylvania mine. It’s now a completely digital system that will eliminate the backlog of retirement applications for full benefits that existed under the paper process.

• In May, the DOGE team announced that it had removed 12.3 million Social Security numbers associated with birth dates from the turn of the 20th century or older from the system.

The DOGE movement “inspired similar cost-cutting and government efficiency efforts at the state level with legislation and executive action across more than two dozen states,” Ferrechio noted.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis established the state’s Government Efficiency Task Force to audit county governments and identify and eliminate wasteful spending.

So far, the audits have uncovered $75,000 spent by the city of Jacksonville on a “hologram” of Mayor Donna Deegan, $150,000 annually for a company that brings drag shows to the Pensacola city theater, and $572,000 for “unconscious bias training” in Hillsborough County.

2026 Contract With Our Readers

  DOGE is still in business, with substantial and growing impact, WorldTribune.com, yes