The world’s richest man and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, reportedly didn’t start preparing to upend the federal bureaucracy until the days after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, according to a new report.
Musk and his team of young computer engineers have been gutting the federal government, recommending the firing of tens of thousands of civil servants — including at least 6,000 US veterans — and shuttering entire agencies since Trump’s inauguration earlier this year.
But the plan for DOGE’s work didn’t begin in earnest until after Trump won, when Musk and a group of MAGA loyalists reportedly began hurriedly throwing together a plan for shaving down the federal workforce, according to a New York Times report. In early November, Musk began staying at a $2,000 a night cottage on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort property in Florida, where the early plans for DOGE started to form.
At the time, failed Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was still co-leading the group alongside Musk. Sources familiar with the situation told the newspaper that Musk and Ramaswamy’s early challenges involved trying to determine a legal structure for accomplishing their goals.
One source described their methodology as throwing “spaghetti against the wall.”
The rest of the group included billionaire Howard Lutnick — who was running Trump’s transition operation and has since become his commerce secretary — and healthcare entrepreneur Brad Smith, who had previously worked with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Smith reportedly had to give Musk a basic budgeting and civics lesson to bring him up to speed on how Congressional appropriations worked.
The source said Musk did not care for Smith — preferring instead to surround himself with his own loyalists — and accused him of offering too much “classic consultant stuff.”
Smith reportedly warned that DOGE would need an army of lawyers to legally carry out its goals, but Musk reportedly wanted to ignore the legal process and tear down the federal government.
Trump initially announced that DOGE would act as an independent entity advising the government, but Musk reportedly didn’t like that idea in part because it would be subject to public records rules.
Musk has insisted that he wants DOGE to be transparent but reportedly was obsessed with maintaining confidentiality and was afraid of leaks. The arrangement reportedly was structured in a way that Musk would be protected from FOIA requests, as they do not apply to presidential advisers or White House entities with only advisory roles, like the National Security Council.
Instead, Musk was named as an adviser to Trump and later as a “special government employee.” DOGE would go on to take over the US Digital Service within the Office of Management and Budget, an agency created by former President Barack Obama to modernize federal government agencies.
As a special government employee, Musk is also able to keep his financial disclosures private.
Musk continued to spend time with Trump-world mainstays; he received lessons on how the executive branch operates from Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, who is credited as the architect of the administration’s draconian anti-immigration policies. The DOGE head later struck up a quick friendship with current OMB boss Russell Vought, who co-authored the near-universally loathed Project 2025.
Both Musk and Vought agreed that they wanted to take the most extreme measures possible to rip apart the federal government. Vought would later go on to say that he wanted federal workers to feel “miserable” and to make coming to work for the government a “traumatic experience.”
Since then, Musk and his team have gained access to numerous sensitive federal databases, including those that store Americans’ Social Security Numbers and financial information. They have all but shuttered USAID, which engages in development and influence programs across the world. He admitted to Trump’s cabinet this week that shuttering USAID temporarily ended an Ebola prevention program.
He said the program was restored immediately and without interruption, but a former agency head accused Musk of misrepresenting the situation at USAID to save face politically.
Musk’s layoffs and strong-arming of civil servants into quitting — including emails demanding they justify their jobs — has already resulted in a massive reduction of the federal workforce, with more trimming promised. The DOGE head has stated his goal is to reduce the 2.3 million-member federal workforce by 75 percent.
The Independent has requested comment from Musk and DOGE.
