At midnight EST on Monday, Elon Musk hopped online for a live chat to boast about his team’s early efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.
Musk, the Tesla CEO whom President Donald Trump has appointed to lead a massive government shakeup, has spent the first two weeks of the new administration surveying the inner workings of the federal government and declaring early victories in his war on regulations and bureaucrats. His early moves have rattled federal employees, Democrats and government watchdogs who say his maneuvers are unprecedented.
For Musk, who envisions a colossal government revamp, that’s the whole point.
Following two weeks of widespread government upheavals spurred by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the midnight conversation — hosted on Musk’s social media platform X — was just the latest sign that this effort is not your standard squeezing of the federal bureaucracy.
Musk and the Trump administration have already moved to push widespread resignations of government workers, and his allies have landed in senior roles in agencies that handle the government’s personnel, operations and spending. The users who tuned into the early-morning chat were privy to Musk’s reflections on moves he sees as early wins and a preview of his plans for additional cuts to the government.
“President Trump takes improving government efficiency very seriously,” Musk told listeners Monday morning. “I think DOGE will … have a very serious and significant impact on government waste and fraud and abuse, which is really astonishing in its scale and scope.”
Musk’s online DOGE pep rally follows two weeks of turbulence for the federal government in Trump’s early days as president, with Musk and his allies at the center of the shakeups.
“It appears that they’re trying to devastate the federal bureaucracy,” said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University.
“It’s not unusual for a new administration to come in with a sense that they don’t like program X or program Y, but to come in and shut down vast classes of programs is entirely unprecedented,” Super said.
‘Shut it down’
DOGE’s latest target: the federal agency that doles out foreign aid.
Employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development were told to work from home Monday and that the agency’s Washington headquarters would be closed that day, POLITICO reported. The advisory came after Musk said early Monday, “We’re in the process of … shutting down USAID.”
As his team dug into USAID, Musk said, “It became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms.” The agency is “beyond repair,” he said. “You’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.”
Musk said Trump is on board. “He agreed,” Musk said, that “we should shut it down.”
The DOGE team began mapping out its efforts prior to Trump’s November election. After Trump created the U.S. DOGE Service on his first day in office, Musk’s team moved quickly into some little-known but influential corners of the federal bureaucracy.
Musk personally visited the Office of Personnel Management worksite in late January, The New York Times reported, and his associates have been appointed as senior advisers inside the agency that acts as the federal government’s human resources arm.
OPM in late January launched an effort to encourage the mass resignations of federal employees by sending an email titled, “Fork in the Road,” borrowing a subject line sent to employees of Twitter when Musk bought that social media platform, later rebranding it as X.
Musk allies working inside OPM include the agency’s chief of staff Amanda Scales, who previously worked at Musk’s company xAI; Anthony Armstrong, who advised Musk on his Twitter acquisition; Brian Bjelde, an engineer who has led the human resources team at Musk’s SpaceX; and Riccardo Biasini, an engineer who worked at Musk’s tunnel-construction firm, the Boring Co.
An OPM spokesperson confirmed that Armstrong, Bjelde and Biasini are all senior advisers at the agency but did not respond to a request for additional details about how DOGE is working with OPM on the administration’s personnel initiatives. The New York Times previously reported OPM’s hires of Musk’s allies.
Trump administration officials directed career staff inside OPM to make plans to slash that agency’s workforce and programs by 70 percent, the Federal News Network reported last week.
Eyes on office space, payment systems
The DOGE team has also set its sights on the General Services Administration, the agency that oversees federal real estate, acquisitions and technology services.
Musk visited GSA headquarters last week, and Musk ally Steve Davis is using his role at DOGE to zero in on that agency, the Times reported. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, joined GSA in late January as director of technology transformation services.
DOGE has boasted about GSA’s lease terminations of underused office space in Trump’s early days.
The Musk-led efforts are reportedly already causing friction and resignations inside federal agencies.
Two top officials at USAID were put on leave Saturday after they refused to give Musk’s team access to internal systems, the Times reported. And that agency’s Trump-appointed chief of staff resigned days into his new job, according to the newspaper.
Katie Miller, a Trump administration DOGE official, posted in response to a news report about the officials being placed on leave, “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”
Also last week, the Treasury Department’s top-ranking career official announced his retirement from that agency following a dispute with Musk allies over access to sensitive payment systems, The Washington Post reported.
Musk posted on the website X on Sunday, “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress. This needs to stop NOW!”
‘He’s doing a great job’
Trump says he’s a fan of Musk’s work so far.
“I think Elon is doing a good job,” Trump said Sunday, according to a White House pool report. “He’s a big cost-cutter. Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”
The affection is mutual.
“The more I’ve gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him,” Musk told his audience on X Spaces on Monday morning. “Frankly, I love the guy. He’s great.”
Vivek Ramaswamy — Musk’s former co-leader of DOGE — joined the Tesla CEO in the Monday discussion, praising DOGE’s early work. “You’ve been kicking ass in the last couple of weeks,” Ramaswamy told Musk. Ramaswamy left the operation as he plans a run to be Ohio’s next governor.
Two Republican senators and DOGE supporters — Joni Ernst of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah — also joined the early morning chat to applaud Musk’s work.
Musk has repeatedly vowed to make the DOGE effort transparent, although the Trump administration hasn’t released details about the structure of DOGE within the White House or about how the effort is interacting with the federal agencies it aims to downsize.
The live chats on his social media platform will be recurring, Musk said Monday around 1 a.m. as the first discussion wrapped up.
“We’ll be doing this every week,” he said. “So look forward to having members from the House and other contributors” to “try to keep the people informed,” he said. “I think it’ll be very interesting to follow along.”
