In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear

People protest President Donald Trump's decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development during a demonstration on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

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Activists protested outside the Treasury Department on Tuesday, after Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team gained access to the department’s payments system.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear

By Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin,
Hannah Natanson, Jonathan O'Connell
14–18 minutes

Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions.

In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.

The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president.

Though led by Musk’s team, this campaign is broadly supported by President Donald Trump and his senior leadership, who will be crucial to implementing its next stages. And while resistance to Musk has emerged in the federal courts, among federal employee unions and in pockets of Congress, allies say the billionaire’s talent for ripping apart and transforming institutions has been underestimated — as has been proved in the scant time since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

“Chaos is often the birthplace of new orders, new systems and new paradigms. Washington doesn’t know how to deal with people who refuse to play the game by their rules,” said investor Shervin Pishevar, a longtime friend of Musk’s.

Noting that Musk’s political inexperience has long been derided in Washington, Pishevar added: “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are two different storms backed by a majority of Americans — one political, one technological. But both are tearing through the same rotting structure.”

DOGE’s early directives, its technology-driven approach and its interactions with the federal bureaucracy have provided an increasingly clear picture of their end goal for government — and clarified the stakes of Trump’s second term.

People protest President Donald Trump's decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development during a demonstration on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

If Musk is successful, the federal workforce will be cut by at least 10 percent. A mass bid for voluntary resignations — blocked by a federal judge who has scheduled a Monday hearing — is expected to be only the first step before mass involuntary dismissals. Those are likely to include new hires or people with poor performance reviews, according to a plan laid out in memos issued over the last week by the Office of Personnel Management, which is now under Musk’s control. Unions this week advised workers to download their performance reviews and personnel files in preparation for having the information used against them.

As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk.

“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”

To replace the existing civil service, Musk’s allies are looking to technology. DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools or even robots.

That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation.

“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” said a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

The defenestration of the federal workforce could clear the way for Trump and Musk to cancel federal spending or eliminate entire agencies without approval of Congress, an unprecedented expansion of executive power. This week, Tom Krause, a Musk ally, was installed to oversee an agency in the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for executing trillions of dollars in annual payments to the full array of recipients, from contractors and grantees to military families and retirees. The Bureau of Fiscal Service has long simply cut the checks as ordered by various federal agencies, but Krause’s appointment may change that.

Meanwhile, White House officials have begun preparing budget documents that seek to cut some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. It’s unclear whether Trump will feel compelled to ask Congress to approve those cuts. Though the Constitution specifically invests spending power in Congress, Musk and Trump budget chief Russell Vought have argued they should have authority to slash spending unilaterally.

Taken together, experts say, these shifts amount to one of the most aggressive attempted overhauls of the federal government in American history.

David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University, said the proposed cuts would return the modern civil service to the late 19th century, before the enactment of anti-corruption reforms. Super said the two biggest previous power grabs were President Richard M. Nixon’s 1973 attempt to cancel federal programs he didn’t like and President Harry S. Truman’s 1952 effort to nationalize the steel industry — both of which were struck down by the courts.

“The administration is doing the equivalent of these moves several times a day, every day,” Super said. “The division we’ve had since 1787 is checks and balances — that no one branch is preeminent, but that all three are required to work together. The vision here is an extremely strong executive and a subordinate judiciary and Congress.”

Musk’s defenders say he and Trump are applying the long-standing idea of “zero based budgeting” — taking all spending to zero and then rebuilding from scratch — to the federal government for the first time. The moves are also characteristic of Musk’s boundary-pushing management style. When he took over Twitter, he fired more than 75 percent of the staff. He also has had a preference for a lean workforce at Tesla, an opposition to unions at all his companies and a habitual willingness everywhere to push past norms and rules.

Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes free markets, said the aggressive measures are justified in part by the severity of the nation’s deteriorating fiscal picture and the staggering rise in regulations during the Biden administration.

“There’s been this massive freak-out over what Trump and Elon are doing. But frankly it’s not been an evenhanded narrative. Because, when Biden was in charge, when Obama was in charge, they did a lot of things that were shot down 9-0 by the courts and there was not the degree of concern over breaking laws and precedent,” Roy said, pointing to President Joe Biden’s unilateral effort to cancel student loan debt.

Of Trump and Musk, Roy said: “They’re trying to say, ‘Let’s start with a clean slate, figure out which programs meet important objectives, and which are fraud and abuse.’ How much of that will survive legal challenge remains to be seen, but if some get knocked down and some lead to more government efficiency, that’s a good thing.”

Initially, few expected Musk to cause such seismic shifts. Musk said he wanted to remake the federal government from scratch — to “delete” all that he viewed wasn’t working and start over — but few took that ambition literally, said Joe Lonsdale, an investor and Palantir co-founder who is friends with Musk.

In the weeks after the election, Trump said Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” would be a nongovernmental entity providing nonbinding advice to the administration. Some Trump advisers described it as place to sideline the overzealous billionaires who wanted to help Trump but knew nothing about how Washington worked.

But within hours of taking office, Trump signed an executive order placing DOGE squarely inside the White House, in an office responsible for information technology, the U.S. Digital Service.

Within days, it became clear that Musk’s ambitions were not merely to remake government technology, as some speculated, but to revamp the entire federal bureaucracy. DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former GOP presidential candidate, quickly left the project amid differences over Musk’s plans to dismantle government by foregrounding technology and bypassing Congress.

“Everyone in the DC laptop class was extremely arrogant,” Lonsdale said. “These people don’t realize there are levels of competence and boldness that are far beyond anything in their sphere.”

The DOGE playbook has been the same everywhere, according to more than two dozen federal workers with direct knowledge of DOGE activities, as well as records obtained by The Post. The workers — employed at OPM, GSA, FEMA, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Education Department — spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

DOGE comes in fast, going around lower-level IT staffers, who typically raise privacy concerns but are overruled by senior leaders who fold to DOGE’s demands. DOGE team members are then given superpowered user accounts enabling them to access and edit reams of government data with little to no oversight, the people said. That allows them to make changes at lightning speed, bypassing typical security protocols and alarming government employees tasked with keeping sensitive data secure.

At OPM, for example, DOGE team members gained the ability to delete, modify or export the personal information of millions of federal workers and federal job applicants. After The Post reported on security concerns over such access, OPM’s interim leadership on Friday directed DOGE agents to be removed from the sensitive personnel system.

Federal workers who have been in meetings with DOGE staffers say their driving mission seems to be slashing spending — both by canceling government contracts and eliminating jobs. They often appear tense, as it facing significant pressure from their bosses to move fast, said a person who has worked with them.

At the GSA, acting administrator Stephen Ehikian — a former Silicon Valley executive — and other Trump appointees have pushed aggressively to cut costs by at least 50 percent, in part by eliminating half of all federal real estate nationwide. That measure was outlined in an email Tuesday to real estate staff from Michael Peters, the new head of the public buildings service.

The messaging has appeared deliberately designed to increase attrition. In an email Tuesday, Ehikian warned of a “very high probability” that the 2,000 people who live more than 50 miles from a service station would be assigned farther away as part of his effort to reorganize the agency. Staff would not know whether they had been reassigned — say, from North Carolina to Colorado — until days after they had to decide whether to accept Musk’s offer to resign with eight months pay.

The Education Department may be furthest along the DOGE path to demolition. DOGE staffers there have begun using AI to analyze the department’s financial data, aiming to cancel every contract that is not required by law or essential to the department’s operations, according to two employees.

On Friday, records obtained by The Post show DOGE staffer Ethan Shaotran editing the department’s website. He also started putting together a new webpage that will track the cancellation of Biden-era grants that pushed “divisive and toxic ideologies through the K-12 system,” according to the records.

Under a heading called “Collected Lowlights,” Shaotran listed nixed programs: A “JEDI” (Justice, Equity Diversity & Inclusion) training for teachers; workshops on “Decolonizing the curriculum” and “Becoming an anti-racist educator”; and “Using taxpayer funds to establish an ‘Equity & Social Justice’ center.’”

“It’s an incredible snatch and grab blitzkrieg,” one Education Department official said. “We’re like the French in the Maginot Line on the border with Germany, and they’re like going around us through Belgium. They’re just … they’re so fast.”

A nascent resistance may yet constrain Musk’s ambitions. Already, multiple lawsuits have been filed to limit DOGE’s access to sensitive federal material. Congress may object to entire federal agencies being abolished without its consent. And the civilian workforce has viewed “buyout” offers skeptically, with unions telling members who work from home not to accept any offers to resign while they plan a legal challenge.

But people who have known Musk for years say his single-minded willingness to break rules in service of a larger mission is unparalleled. He once told Tesla employees they would lose stock options if they joined a union — a comment deemed an unlawful threat by the National Labor Relations Board and the courts. He has tussled with the Federal Aviation Administration over launching rockets without proper permission and paid fines from the Environmental Protection Agency for dumping wastewater on protected Texas wetlands.

For now, most congressional Republicans are supporting Trump and Musk’s transformation of the federal government. But even some conservatives and longtime Trump allies have expressed reservations about their methods.

“It’s a wrecking ball, rather than a scalpel here. Not that I’d complain about that — I’ve always said we need a wrecking ball,” said Stephen Moore, an outside adviser to Trump who has been working to shrink government since the Reagan era.

“But how much authority does the Constitution really give the president to completely reorganize the government on his own?” Moore said. “We’re moving toward an imperial presidency. And whether or not that’s a good thing remains to be seen.”