The Independent Agencies

Over the past decade, Congress has established multiple independent agencies that are supposed to be insulated from interference from the Executive Branch in how they operate. Many of these are small and specialized and relatively unknown to the general public. That hasn’t stopped DOGE from interfering with them, in a coordinated effort with the White House that usually included the following steps:

• President Trump will issue an executive order targeting one or more independent agencies by name (e.g., this executive order that targeted the USIP, USADF and IAF). This is meant to provide the legal cover.
• A DOGE team (usually led by Nate Cavanaugh) then makes contact with the agency, usually under the usual pretenses of “IT modernization” and convinces/threatens them to sign an MOU detailing DOGE to the agency
• If the agency is governed by a board of directors, White House lawyer Trent Morse will email enough of the board to eliminate quorum with a message telling them that their employment has been terminated by the President. If the board has a partisan split, these will always be the Democratic-appointed members first. The goal is to either render the board inert or make it a puppet for whatever DOGE wants
• Once inside, DOGE will often move quickly to seize control of the agency’s financial systems and emails. Staff are immediately placed on indefinite administrative leave to prevent them from acting against them or monitoring what happens. DOGE will then send emails to terminate a large portion of grants with the justification that they no longer “effectuate administration priorities”
• DOGE will then proceed with plan to conduct a massive layoff (known as a Reduction in Force or RIF in government terminology) to reduce the agency to the bare minimum of staff needed to meet its “statutory requirements.” Much like obscenity, this is a seemingly precise definition that is remarkably arbitrary and in some cases, DOGE have used this justification to reduce an agency to a single person. Thus far, these arguments have not prevailed in court, but DOGE is hoping for a lucky break on this in a higher appeals court or the Supreme Court. Regardless, the agency is left functionally inert and unable to fulfill any of its duties towards the American public.

DOGE honed its moves against independent agencies by first attacking USAID and CFPB, and details on those can be found on their respective pages. This page is going to look at a flurry of individual incidents against each agency.

Phases of Attack

2/19: “Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”

The pattern of assaulting independent agencies began with an Executive Order “Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” issued on 2025-02-19 that mandated that “The non-statutory components and functions of the following governmental entities shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” for the Presidio Trust, Inter-American Foundation, United States African Development Foundation and US Institute of Peace. This was followed by DOGE taking over the various agencies.

It started with the USADF and IAF

Thanks to testimony entered in the lawsuit of United States Institute of Peace v. Jackson (D.D.C.), we have a remarkably detailed timeline for the DOGE assault on the US Institute of Peace:

3/14: “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”

In another executive order “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”, the Trump administration amplified the tactics of the first order, both by widening the number of agencies being examined and reducing the timeframes for their compliance. This order targeted the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media (aka Voice of America), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund; and the Minority Business Development Agency.

From there, it’s just been open season on every independent agency from DOGE. Here are the attacks grouped by agency types.

Targeting the Arts

The arts have been a natural target for DOGE, which shares the Trump Administration’s disdain for supporting the arts, unless it’s the creation of statues for a garden of American heroes. To be clear, there have been many assaults on arts organizations outside of DOGE’s involvement - just recently, Trump has attempted to oust the head of the National Portrait Gallery for instance - but there have been a few organizations that have seen DOGE target them specifically:

• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)
• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP)
• The National Gallery of Art (technically, this is not an executive branch agency, but that doesn’t deter DOGE)

Finance and Regulations

DOGE has also attempted to target several financial and trade regulatory agencies

• Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC)
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
• Export-Import Bank of America (EXIM)
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
• Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)
• National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation has also found itself under the thumb of DOGE

Service Organizations

Service organizations have also been a focus

• AmeriCorps
• The Peace Corps

Legislative Branch Agencies

In one of DOGE’s most bizarre turns, thet have attempted to embed DOGE teams into the Library of Congress and Government Accountability Office (GAO). The problem is that both of these are legislative branch agencies and thus well outside the authority of DOGE to police them or shut them down.

Merit System Protection Board

Finally, DOGE has picked up its original mission of harrassing federal workers by attempting to shut down the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), which ensures that government personnel rules are fairly enforced.

Everybody Else

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