DOGE's Projects

Now that we are several months into DOGE’s regime, it’s a little bit easier to see the deliberate goals behind the smash-and-grab antics. Much of the early media coverage focused on DOGE as if it were an independent entity and its actions were attuned to whatever would benefit Elon. That is still true of course, but it’s also now clear that DOGE has been the “boots on the ground” within agencies, there to enforce the political aims of the Trump administration. I personally found it useful to consider the executive branch as a triumvirate composed of Elon Musk, Russell Vought and Stephen Miller (whose wife, Katie Miller was in DOGE from the start). DOGE has embarked on the following major projects to enforce their aims:

• Attacking the Civil Service mixed the political savvy and goals of Vought to “put [bureaucrats] in trauma” with Elon Musk’s tactics that he used against Twitter employees.
• Fraud and Waste has been the justification for DOGE’s aggressive interventions within various agencies, and DOGE’s defenders have repeatedly trotted out shocking statistics that prove that government is wasteful. Unfortunately, none of these hold up under and real examination.
• Seizing Control of Spending includes multiple ways in which DOGE has provided the technical means for Vought’s desire for impoundment (allowing the President to withhold funds appropriated by Congress) mixed with Musk’s conviction that government spending is riddled with fraud. These efforts might ultimately be overturned by the courts, but the damage will be done and lives will be lost before then.
• Regulatory Rollback has been a constant dream of the conservative movement. DOGE’s work here has been to automate regulatory review and weaken enforcement through slashing grants or even shuttering agencies.
• “IT Modernization” has long been an ironic joke about DOGE - it is the stated purpose for DOGE’s entry into many agencies where they then do everything but - but there are a few cases of DOGE working on IT projects. This also includes some AI pilot projects that DOGE has launched.
• “God View” is DOGE’s most ominous technical project. Starting in February, DOGE has been working on projects to aggregate highly sensitive data currently housed in different systems in different agencies (like the IRS or SSA) into centralized systems to give them things like the ability to track and surveil immigrants. The goal is a single place to be able to monitor anybody they want. Not only is this a likely violation of the Privacy Act, it will irreparably rupture the public trust in government to collect data.

To also help provide some context for the big picture, this section also includes a few useful overviews:

• Executive Orders is a listing of the Trump Executive Orders issued this term that have furthered DOGE’s agenda.
• DOGE’s Timeline is a high-level timeline of significant events in DOGE’s history so far.