President Donald Trump has empowered mega-billionaire Elon Musk to pursue an unprecedented purging of federal workers from the federal government, ostensibly to make it run more “efficiently.” But there are growing signs that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is in fact sabotaging Trump’s own political appointees and the president’s ability to govern.
The Washington Post, citing more than 30 current and former officials and their advisers, reported that Musk’s aggressive tactics “have irritated and blindsided many senior officials in the Trump administration, including those tasked with running Cabinet departments being squeezed by his U.S. DOGE Service.” Among other things the Post found that:
- DOGE is acting so unilaterally that many of Trump’s appointees are learning about losing their own staff through news reports or even Musk’s posts on X, rather than through internal communication.
- DOGE-designed freezes at agencies such as USAID have hurt nonprofit groups that the Trump administration claims that it supports.
- Cabinet secretaries are being forced to make awkward promises to concerned Republican lawmakers — that is, their own party allies — to investigate DOGE-driven cuts at their own departments.
- Top officials at the Treasury “expressed frustration to confidants” that DOGE’s access to the department’s sensitive payments systems “weakened their standing” with career staff.
There are two particularly important dynamics at play here. First, Trump expects his appointees to execute a high-stakes policy agenda on everything from diplomacy to immigration to tariffs. But DOGE’s chainsaw is disemboweling the agencies and institutional knowledge required to execute that agenda faster than new Trump lieutenants can even get their bearings in Washington.
Second, the administration has an emerging crisis of authority. Trump has endowed both DOGE and his political appointees with power to change the government, but insofar as their objectives are at times directly at odds, it’s unclear who represents the true voice of Trump. That, in turn, blunts the authority of DOGE and Trump’s chosen leaders of government.
Consider this episode of utter dysfunction: Over the weekend Musk sent an email to federal employees demanding they send in bullet list summaries of what work they had done in the previous week — or lose their jobs. But a number of agencies, including those led by some of Trump’s most high profile and loyal allies, such as FBI director Kash Patel, told their employees to ignore the email. Matters only became more confusing from there. Trump told reporters on Monday that employees who failed to send in their bullet points could be “fired” or “semi-fired,” without explaining what “semi-fired” means. That same day, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management told federal agency leaders that they could ignore Musk’s ultimatum, according to The Washington Post. But before federal employees had a chance to catch their breath, Musk announced employees would be given a “second chance” and warned that “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.” One month into Trump’s second term, there is a growing tension between cutting the size of government and carrying out his plans. Whether the president realizes it or not, DOGE is sowing mistrust within the government, prompting his own personnel to ask who’s in charge, who should be trusted and who should be ignored. The chaos created threatens to engulf his administration and derail, or at least complicate, much of his right-wing nationalist agenda.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
