How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy
The operation was driven with a frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies.
Jonathan SwanTheodore SchleiferMaggie HabermanRyan MacKate CongerNicholas Nehamas and Madeleine Ngo
On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
Mr. Musk’s visit was meant to be discreet. Still skittish about getting involved publicly in politics, he told the guests he had to be careful about supporting anyone in the Republican nomination fight. And yet here he was — joined by Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children — at a $50,000-a-head dinner in honor of the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.
As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
What started as musings at a dinner party evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. It was driven with a frenetic focus by Mr. Musk, who channeled his libertarian impulses and resentment of regulatory oversight of his vast business holdings into a singular position of influence.
Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure. Already, his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has inserted itself into more than 20 agencies, The New York Times has found.
Mr. Musk’s strategy has been twofold. His team grabbed control of the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, commandeering email systems to pressure civil servants to quit so he could cull the work force. And it burrowed into computer systems across the bureaucracy, tracing how money was flowing so the administration could choke it off. So far, Musk staff members have sought access to at least seven sensitive government databases, including internal systems of the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk’s transformation of DOGE from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the Trump era. It involves wild experimentation and an embrace of severe cost-cutting that Mr. Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with President Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable.
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In reporting how Mr. Musk and his allies executed their plan, The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people, including DOGE workers, friends of Mr. Musk’s, White House aides and administration officials who are dealing with the operation from the inside. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, many described a culture of secrecy that has made them afraid to speak publicly because of potential retaliation.
Mr. Musk’s stealth approach stunned both Democrats and civil servants. Failing to imagine an incursion from inside the bureaucracy, they were caught essentially defenseless.
The Times has learned new details about how the operation came together after the election, mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.
Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
They would call it the U.S. DOGE Service, and they would not even have to change the initials.
They began their move on the digital service unit earlier than has previously been reported, The Times found, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office — giving them the ability to operate on Mr. Trump’s first day.
Around the time that Mr. Musk identified the office as a key part of his strategy late last year, the Trump transition team gained a key ally on the inside. A U.S.D.S. veteran named Amy Gleason rejoined its staff as a senior adviser at the end of the Biden administration, described to other employees as someone who would aid the Trump transition. Ms. Gleason, who would later be named the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency, recommended that the unit bring aboard several young engineers who would later become part of Mr. Musk’s team.
Allies of Mr. Musk, meanwhile, fanned out across the government as part of the transition, extracting intelligence about computer systems, contracts and personnel.
The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A month into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.
His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
“President Trump’s brilliant idea to create a Department of Government Efficiency remains overwhelmingly popular with the American people, and there is no one better on the planet to oversee this effort than Elon Musk,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.
She declined to answer specific questions about The Times’s reporting, but added that Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and the cabinet “are working together to identify waste, fraud and abuse, and have already saved taxpayers billions of dollars.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
An Alignment With Trump
Mr. Musk at the Capitol in July. Last summer he perceived the Biden administration to be making deliberate efforts to harm his businesses Tesla and SpaceX.Credit…Samuel Corum/Bloomberg
At three pro-Trump dinners organized by Mr. Musk and the billionaire investor Nelson Peltz over the course of 2024, Mr. Musk touted the need for a smaller government but struggled to offer specific ideas.
At the time, he was infuriated by Mr. Biden and what he saw as deliberate efforts by the administration to harm his businesses Tesla and SpaceX.
By the time Mr. Trump took the stage at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, Mr. Musk saw him as his only hope. Immediately after a bullet fired by a would-be assassin grazed Mr. Trump’s ear, coming within an inch of possibly killing him, Mr. Musk endorsed him in a post on X. In the months that followed, he would plow almost $300 million into efforts to re-elect Mr. Trump.
The assassination attempt on Mr. Trump at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pa., propelled Mr. Musk to endorse his campaign for president.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
But Mr. Musk also quickly seeded the idea with Mr. Trump that he could be more than just a campaign donor.
His first public mention of what would evolve into the Department of Government Efficiency came less than three weeks later. More than an hour into a lengthy Aug. 2 podcast with the interviewer Lex Fridman, Mr. Musk began musing about what he saw as overregulation hampering human progress.
“I wish you could just, like, for a week, go into Washington,” Mr. Fridman said, proposing that his counterpart make “government smaller.”
“I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission,” Mr. Musk replied. “And I would be willing to be part of that commission.”
Eleven days later, Mr. Musk hosted Mr. Trump for a live audio discussion on X, using the power of the platform he owned to champion his preferred candidate. Mr. Musk once again raised his idea of a “government efficiency commission” to ensure that taxpayer money was “spent in a good way.”
“I’d love it,” Mr. Trump said.
The national debt grew by roughly $8 trillion during Mr. Trump’s first term. Privately, he had told allies in 2020 that in “year five” of his presidency — which in his mind would be 2021 — he would begin tackling the debt crisis.
Since then, Mr. Trump has become more fixated on the debt; he has told advisers that America could be on the verge of a “1929” moment, his shorthand for another Great Depression. He has described Mr. Musk as a “genius” and said that if anyone could tackle this problem, it was the world’s richest man.
As the summer went on, Mr. Musk continued to toy with the idea. On Aug. 19, he responded to an account on X suggesting that he name the proposed organization the Department of Government Efficiency. Its abbreviation, DOGE, was a reference to Dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency that the billionaire had joked about for years, sometimes causing wild fluctuations in its price.
“That is the perfect name,” Mr. Musk replied on X.
By Sept. 5, the idea was announced as a central pillar of Mr. Trump’s economic proposals. In a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Mr. Trump, who by then was the Republican nominee, said he would create a government efficiency commission helmed by Mr. Musk. The effort, which Mr. Trump offered few details about at the time, would “save trillions of dollars,” he claimed.
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York in September, Mr. Trump said he would create a government efficiency commission helmed by Mr. Musk.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
The idea gathered momentum in the month before the election. The billionaire Howard Lutnick, who was running Mr. Trump’s transition operation and would later become his commerce secretary, envisioned the endeavor as a partnership between him and Mr. Musk, visiting him in Texas in October to discuss the project.
Mr. Lutnick told associates at the time that Mr. Musk would cut $1 trillion of waste out of the budget and that Mr. Lutnick would earn $1 trillion for the United States through tariffs, the closing of tax loopholes and a more aggressive capitalization of America’s natural resources and hard assets. Together those efforts would make up $2 trillion and eliminate the federal deficit.
But Mr. Musk’s concept of the Department of Government Efficiency was still quite unformed. A little more than a week before the election, at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, the billionaire muddled Mr. Lutnick’s specifics by combining the cutting and revenue-raising portions of the effort. In front of a raucous crowd, Mr. Lutnick asked the world’s richest man how much he thought he could eliminate from the federal budget.
“Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Mr. Musk replied.
The People Carrying Out Musk’s Plans at DOGE
The Times identified 49 people within the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group formed by Elon Musk that in a short few weeks has radically upended federal agencies.
A Plan Takes Shape
Mr. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, right, led a small circle of people in planning a takeover of the federal bureaucracy, including brainstorming ways to terminate government workers.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Mr. Musk was elated by Mr. Trump’s win, but he had done virtually no preparation for his new initiative. Two days after the election, on Nov. 7, Mr. Musk was in the tearoom at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and members-only club in Palm Beach. He would spend much of the next two months there, staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage on the property.
In the days and weeks that followed, a tight circle began planning how to swiftly upend the bureaucracy, starting essentially from scratch. The group included Mr. Musk; Mr. Ramaswamy, who was then DOGE’s co-leader; Mr. Lutnick; and a health care entrepreneur, Brad Smith, who had worked with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during the first Trump term. Mr. Smith was a close business associate of Ms. Gleason, who had worked at one of his companies as a chief product officer.
Mr. Musk had still not figured out the legal structure for his effort or how it would work. He and Mr. Ramaswamy hurriedly tried to answer fundamental questions, pressure-testing ideas with prospective cabinet members and budget experts.
It was “spaghetti against the wall,” according to one person in touch with Mr. Musk at the time.
In the first week after the election, Mr. Smith gave Mr. Musk a presentation that amounted to a basic budget and civics lesson, explaining how Congress appropriated funds and noting major line items like defense and health care.
Mr. Smith weeks earlier had sold a company for almost $3 billion, but he would struggle to earn Mr. Musk’s respect. Mr. Musk wanted to staff the effort with loyal lieutenants, and viewed Mr. Smith as someone he had inherited.
Brad Smith, right, a health care entrepreneur who worked with Jared Kushner in Mr. Trump’s first term, was part of a small circle that after the 2024 election began planning to upend the bureaucracy.Credit…Alamy
In one early meeting, Mr. Musk said Mr. Smith was being too careful and offering “classic consultant stuff.” In discussions, Mr. Musk expressed impatience with Mr. Smith’s caution that the team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and regulations. Mr. Musk wanted to tear down the government to the studs, and saw Mr. Smith’s approach as incremental.
The people, he said, voted for radical change. When someone asked at one point how Mr. Musk decided how to fire people at Twitter, he said he tried “to figure out who you can’t live without.” “Who are the people we have to keep?” Mr. Musk said.
The group at Mar-a-Lago brainstormed ways to terminate federal workers. One idea was to motivate them to quit, by forcing them to return to the office five days a week or, as Mr. Ramaswamy suggested, moving civil servants to work on administration priorities like border security. Mr. Ramaswamy predicted to the team that many federal workers would not want to be part of an immigration crackdown and would leave government — a win-win situation.
They discussed the likelihood of litigation and welcomed the idea that Democrats would sue them. They liked their chances with a Supreme Court that Mr. Trump had transformed in his first term, with a majority that now favored an expansive vision of executive power. The planning mirrored Mr. Musk’s tactics during his takeover at Twitter, when his lieutenants rushed layoffs and said they were willing to risk lawsuits from former employees.
Mr. Trump had announced the Department of Government Efficiency on Nov. 12 as an entity outside of government, but Mr. Musk quickly began to see problems with that — including the fact that it could be subject to public-record rules. He was also intent on getting access to federal data and payment systems. He felt that if he could not, the whole endeavor would be a waste of his time.
Several people involved in the talks were familiar with the White House digital office, including Mr. Smith, who had worked with the unit on a Covid database as a senior official in the first Trump administration. Mr. Musk was indifferent when the notion of taking it over was first floated, but warmed to the idea.
Eventually, Mr. Musk’s team settled on a plan but kept it a secret for weeks, even blindsiding some people working with him.
The operation would take over the U.S. Digital Service, which had been housed within the Office of Management and Budget, and would become a stand-alone entity in the executive office of the president. Mr. Musk would not be named the DOGE administrator, but rather an adviser to Mr. Trump in the White House.
An advantage of this complicated structure was secrecy. For all his talk about “transparency,” Mr. Musk was obsessed with confidentiality and fearful of leaks. If people filed lawsuits seeking disclosure of his emails or the operation’s records under the Freedom of Information Act, the arrangement would set the administration up to argue that such documents were exempt. In contrast with agencies like the Office of Management and Budget, FOIA does not apply to a president’s White House advisers or to White House entities that advise him but wield no formal power, like the National Security Council.
As he developed his strategy, Mr. Musk drew guidance on how the executive branch operates from Mr. Trump’s senior adviser Mr. Miller and his wife, Katie. The Millers had worked with Mr. Musk in between Mr. Trump’s terms, helping to guide his political spending behind the scenes. After the election, they became even more essential in helping him decode and navigate Mr. Trump’s world.
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Stephen Miller, wearing a light gray suit, in November. He helped guide Mr. Musk’s political spending behind the scenes.Credit…Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Mr. Musk also absorbed as much as he could about the budget process and the bureaucracy that he intended to dismantle from Mr. Vought, who had served as director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget in Mr. Trump’s first term.
Mr. Vought was seen as radioactive by some in Mr. Trump’s inner circle because of his association with the unpopular conservative initiative Project 2025. He was not on the initial list of people under consideration to be budget director — a list populated by corporate finance types.
But Mr. Vought and Mr. Musk hit it off when they met, along with Mr. Ramaswamy, at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 14. They were on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible. Eight days later, Mr. Trump
