President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have spent months boasting about their plans to use a new “Department of Government Efficiency” to dramatically reshape the federal government.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said in November. DOGE, he said, would aid his efforts to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”
So when Trump dropped his executive order launching the operation Monday, some DOGE watchers were surprised by the seemingly scaled-back plan to modernize federal technology and software from an operation housed within a White House tech shop.
Trump’s order creates DOGE by repurposing the existing U.S. Digital Service — a tech office launched in 2014 in the wake of the HealthCare.gov launch debacle — to become the U.S. DOGE Service.
