How Elon Musk executed his takeover of the federal bureaucracy

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 technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.

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 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.

As the night wore on, 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 Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.

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, 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 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.

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 workforce. 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.

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 Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with President Donald Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable.

In reporting how Musk and his allies executed their plan, the Times interviewed more than 60 people, including DOGE workers, friends of 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.

Musk’s stealth approach stunned 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, Florida, and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.

Seasoned conservative operatives such as Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate 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.

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 Joe Biden was still in office — giving them the ability to operate on Trump’s first day.

Around the time that 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 USDS 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. 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 Musk’s team.

Allies of 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. 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 Trump’s second term, 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 Musk wanted to work with him, 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’ reporting, but added that Trump, Musk and the Cabinet “are working together to identify waste, fraud and abuse, and have already saved taxpayers billions of dollars.”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

At three pro-Trump dinners organized by Musk and billionaire investor Nelson Peltz over the course of 2024, Musk touted the need for a smaller government but struggled to offer specific ideas.

At the time, he was infuriated by Biden and what he saw as deliberate efforts by the administration to harm his businesses Tesla and SpaceX.

By the time Trump took the stage at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, Musk saw him as his only hope. Immediately after a bullet fired by a would-be assassin grazed Trump’s ear, coming within an inch of possibly killing him, Musk endorsed him in a post on X. In the months that followed, he would plow almost $300 million into efforts to reelect Trump.

But Musk also quickly seeded the idea with 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 interviewer Lex Fridman, Musk began musing about what he saw as overregulation hampering human progress.

“I wish you could just, like, for a week, go into Washington,” Fridman said, proposing that his counterpart make “government smaller.”

“I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission,” Musk replied. “And I would be willing to be part of that commission.”

Eleven days later, Musk hosted Trump for a live audio discussion on X, using the power of the platform he owned to champion his preferred candidate. 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,” Trump said.

The national debt grew by roughly $8 trillion during 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, 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 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, 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,” Musk replied on X.

By Sept. 5, the idea was announced as a central pillar of Trump’s economic proposals. In a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump, who by then was the Republican nominee, said he would create a government efficiency commission helmed by Musk. The effort, which Trump offered few details about at the time, would “save trillions of dollars,” he claimed.

The idea gathered momentum in the month before the election. Billionaire Howard Lutnick, who was running Trump’s transition operation and would later become his commerce secretary, envisioned the endeavor as a partnership between him and Musk, visiting him in Texas in October to discuss the project.

Lutnick told associates at the time that Musk would cut $1 trillion of waste out of the budget and that 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 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 Lutnick’s specifics by combining the cutting and revenue-raising portions of the effort. In front of a raucous crowd, Lutnick asked Musk how much he thought he could eliminate from the federal budget.

“Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Musk replied.

Musk was elated by Trump’s win, but he had done virtually no preparation for his new initiative. Two days after the election, on Nov. 7, Musk was in the tearoom at Mar-a-Lago, 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 Musk; Ramaswamy, who was then DOGE’s co-leader; Lutnick; and a health care entrepreneur, Brad Smith, who had worked with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during the first Trump term. Smith was a close business associate of Gleason, who had worked at one of his companies as a chief product officer.

Musk had still not figured out the legal structure for his effort or how it would work. He and 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 Musk at the time.

In the first week after the election, Smith gave 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.

Smith weeks earlier had sold a company for almost $3 billion, but he would struggle to earn Musk’s respect. Musk wanted to staff the effort with loyal lieutenants, and viewed Smith as someone he had inherited.

In one early meeting, Musk said Smith was being too careful and offering “classic consultant stuff.” In discussions, Musk expressed impatience with Smith’s caution that the team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and regulations. Musk wanted to tear down the government to the studs, and saw Smith’s approach as incremental.

The people, he said, voted for radical change. When someone asked at one point how 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?” 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 Ramaswamy suggested, moving civil servants to work on administration priorities like border security. 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 Trump had transformed in his first term, with a majority that now favored an expansive vision of executive power. The planning mirrored Musk’s tactics during his takeover at Twitter, when his lieutenants rushed layoffs and said they were willing to risk lawsuits from former employees.

Trump had announced the Department of Government Efficiency on Nov. 12 as an entity outside of government, but 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 Smith, who had worked with the unit on a COVID-19 database as a senior official in the first Trump administration. Musk was indifferent when the notion of taking it over was first floated, but warmed to the idea.

Eventually, 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. Musk would not be named the DOGE administrator, but rather an adviser to Trump in the White House.

An advantage of this complicated structure was secrecy. For all his talk about “transparency,” 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, Musk drew guidance on how the executive branch operates from Trump’s senior adviser Miller and his wife, Katie. The Millers had worked with Musk in between 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 Trump’s world.

Musk also absorbed as much as he could about the budget process and the bureaucracy that he intended to dismantle from Vought, who had served as director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term.

Vought was seen as radioactive by some in 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 Vought and Musk hit it off when they met, along with 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, Trump announced that Vought would return as his director of the Office of Management and Budget.

For his part, Ramaswamy kept focusing on deregulation, envisioning the Department of Government Efficiency as an entity that would exist outside the government and could take advantage of recent Supreme Court rulings to push huge rollbacks.

But Musk had scant interest in constitutional law. He was constantly pushing the team to be “radical.”

Musk mused in one meeting about shutting down an entire agency. He suggested the Education Department, which Trump had himself vowed to eliminate. And Ramaswamy raised the idea of functionally shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by choking off its funds — a move that he told the group would be legally defensible because the agency receives funding from the Federal Reserve, rather than appropriations from Congress.

Both would later come under immense pressure from Musk’s operation.

On Nov. 14, the Department of Government Efficiency put out a recruiting call on X: Musk and Ramaswamy were looking for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” The DOGE inbox was flooded by thousands of direct messages.

By late November, Musk’s allies were working out of the Trump transition office in West Palm Beach, Florida, interviewing candidates for government jobs. Executive orders that would give the operation its expansive powers were drafted by several people, with a former Trump staff secretary, Derek Lyons, and a former Trump administration lawyer, James Burnham, working in tandem on most of them. (Ramaswamy would eventually leave the effort to run for governor in Ohio, endorsed by Trump and Musk.)

To help execute the strategy, Musk turned to Davis, the cost-cutting adviser who had worked for Musk for two decades at his tunnel construction venture the Boring Co., as well as SpaceX and X, where he oversaw aggressive layoffs and cuts.

Musk told a group at Mar-a-Lago that nobody in the world was better than Davis at dismantling something that needed to be torn apart — though he acknowledged that he might not be the right person to build an organization back up.

“Steve is like chemo,” Musk said during one planning meeting. “A little chemo can save your life; a lot of chemo could kill you.”

Davis, who was in charge of DOGE operations, spent much of the transition in Washington, vetting prospective staff. Musk also interviewed some applicants, often over video chats. The candidates went through a process of engineering tests, background checks and logic puzzles managed by Baris Akis, an investor close to Musk who specializes in headhunting.

Among those who heeded the call late last year was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern from Nebraska. He resembled the ideal Musk candidate: libertarian and a precocious coder who dropped out of college to receive a grant from Peter Thiel, a billionaire investor and Trump supporter.

In December, he began telling people he would probably be working for Musk.

Around that same time, Gleason, a former civil servant and executive at Smith’s Nashville-based company, arrived at the White House digital office. To some there, she was a familiar face, having worked at the tech unit for three years during the first Trump administration and at the beginning of Biden’s term.

When she returned late last year, some staff members were told Gleason would aid the Trump transition.

On Dec. 17, Farritor submitted an application — not to the Trump transition, but to the Biden administration — to work at the digital office.

The application included only one sentence. “Super passionate about serving my country in the USDS!” he wrote, according to documents seen by the Times.

His outreach confused some staff members at the digital services unit. It was not clear to them why someone would be applying with just weeks left of the Biden administration, and with such a lackadaisical submission. Days before Trump’s inauguration, the office rejected Farritor.

He was one of at least three applicants to the digital unit in the final weeks of the Biden presidency who were recommended by Gleason, drawing the attention of some of her colleagues. She would describe these engineers to a friend as smart but uninformed about how government worked.

None of the candidates Gleason referred to USDS were hired immediately. But after Trump’s inauguration, they were swiftly brought aboard as members of the rebranded U.S. DOGE Service, including Farritor, who ultimately gained entry to agencies across the government.

Gleason would eventually be named to a key role: the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Allies of Musk also began arriving at tech hubs in the federal government before Inauguration Day — the first hint of the scope of his incursion.

Davis initially showed up at the White House digital office as part of the transition “landing team.” Staff members — some of whom had worked in previous administrations, including the first Trump term — offered to help identify new hires. But Davis said the group he was working with had its own recruiters — a statement the employees took as a sign that he and his associates were looking for loyalty to Trump and Musk.

Davis also began meeting with leaders of the General Services Administration, which oversees the government’s property portfolio and would later emerge as a key base for Musk’s efforts.

Some of the requests from the incoming Trump officials who were part of the transition seemed odd at the time to career officials, and have made sense only in retrospect.

Several agencies involved in taxation or spending — the Office of Management and Budget, the IRS and the Social Security Administration, among others — received expansive lists of questions from the transition teams, some so aggressive that they struck officials at one agency as if they were discovery demands in litigation. Some lists of questions exceeded a dozen pages.

The queries covered everything from personnel to pending executive orders to in-depth budget data to how much access officials had to government payment systems.

Trump transition aides showed up at the Treasury Department in December, asking to see source code for the closely guarded payment system that processes trillions of dollars every year. At the time, they were introduced as part of the transition team, not as part of the Department of Government Efficiency. They were rebuffed — but would return again and gain access after the inauguration as part of DOGE.

Inauguration week arrived with frigid temperatures in Washington. As the city focused on Trump’s return, Musk was already moving into place. His new hires moved into offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. When career staff arrived that week, they found Post-it notes marking rooms that had been claimed for the Department of Government Efficiency.

One of Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order creating the entity and taking over the White House digital office — codifying the plan developed at Mar-a-Lago weeks earlier. He also signed orders freezing federal hiring and certain categories of spending, and authorized a plan to reduce the size of the federal workforce, putting in motion the kind of mass layoffs that Musk was eager to push through.

Musk filed paperwork to become a “special government employee,” a status that allows him to keep private his financial disclosure form. A White House official has said that it will not be released.

Trump’s aides cleared a space for Musk to use on the second floor of the West Wing. But he found his White House office cramped and unimpressive, dismissing it as a “hovel.” He abandoned it for the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a gilded set of rooms more to his taste. There, he installed a gaming computer with a giant, curved screen and blinking LED lights, and decorated his desk with a DOGE sign and a MAGA hat. He also had a DOGE T-shirt emblazoned with a quote from one of his favorite movies, “Office Space”: “What would you say you do here?”

Musk’s team shocked many civil servants with the speed with which they seized the digital pipelines of the federal bureaucracy. His staff immediately sought access to systems controlled by the Office of Personnel Management, including several of its hiring systems and the agency’s website. Some requested access to the agency’s cloud infrastructure, working to build a system to send mass emails to federal workers.

A swarm of young aides were brought on board as part of the staff of the former White House digital office. Their entry alarmed USDS employees, many of whom said it felt like a hostile takeover.

The new arrivals sat employees down for brisk interviews about their projects, quizzing some about how they perceived the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk — questions that seemed designed to test their loyalty.

From their new perch, DOGE team members rapidly deployed across the federal government. The day after Trump was sworn in, Farritor was scheduled to be outfitted with a new laptop at the General Services Administration. The next week, he showed up at USAID as part of a group that worked to dismantle the agency from within.

Musk’s operation had identified the global aid agency as a supposed area of wasteful spending before the inauguration. After Trump ordered a freeze on foreign aid, Musk’s aides believed that USAID was still sending out money to fulfill preapproved contracts — putting it in the crosshairs. It was one of the first agencies to be upended.

Farritor would also have roles at the Energy, Education and Health and Human Services departments, as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he would seek access to a database that controls contracts and more than $1 trillion in annual payments.

In the following weeks, Musk’s operation would reach nearly every piece of the federal government. He says it is just getting started.

“This is our one & only chance to restore democracy from the dictatorship of the bureaucracy,” Musk wrote in a post on X this past week. “It is now or never. It must be now.”

Jodi Kantor and Charlie Savage contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill, Susan C. Beachy and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.