The Telegraph – Donald Trump’s ‘special government employee’ is due to leave his role with DOGE at the end of May
“At some point, he’s going to be going back … I’d keep him as long as I could keep him”, said US President Donald Trump of Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief, at an Oval Office press conference last week.
The President returned to the theme on Thursday, as he said “I want Elon to stay as long as possible,” but that “Doge will stay active” long after he eventually departs.
This reflects what Trump always intended for both Musk, who presides over six companies while also serving as a special adviser to the president, and for DOGE, a government agency built by executive order on the previously little-known United States Digital Service.
From the start Musk was meant to be a transient part of Trump’s administration and broader movement to reset and rein in the US government. But the mainstream media, which has long tried to discredit Musk and undermine his close relationship with Trump, has insinuated that his eventual departure will be the result of tensions within the administration.
This has included reported complaints from cabinet members who believe that DOGE cuts are threatening their agencies’ operations, and from Republican members of Congress who have faced pushback and protests from constituents angered by DOGE cuts in federal government spending and employment.
Musk’s operations have been blamed for sub-par Republican performance in a handful of special elections. These include the sound defeat of a Republican-backed candidate for an open seat on Wisconsin’s elected state supreme court, for whom Musk heavily campaigned and to whose campaign Musk or Musk-affiliated political organisations donated over $20 million.
Nevertheless, Musk, who has played a leading role at DOGE as a “special government employee” since Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, is legally eligible to hold his appointment for only 130 days, or until around May 30. Despite some speculation that Trump would find a way around the 130-day restriction, no plan has emerged.
DOGE itself, which has a mandate to cut $2 trillion from US government spending – or around one-third of the current annual budget and an amount that could eliminate the US’s current deficit – remains set to expire, or, as Musk has put it, “delete itself”, on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
To date, DOGE’s website maintains that it has eliminated an estimated $140 billion in federal government spending through an array of means, including “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reduction”.
The exact figure is disputed, but widespread media reports have substantiated many of these measures, which are also recorded as line items in databases available on the DOGE website.
Musk claims that DOGE is on track to eliminate up to $1 trillion by the time of his pre-scheduled departure in May. Some budget analysts are sceptical that he can do so without touching entitlement spending like Social Security, a measure that would be politically unpopular and could endanger the Republicans’ House majority in the 2026 midterm elections.
Some additional cuts will also depend on Congress, which must approve many far-ranging measures to cut costs. These include the abolition of government departments and agencies, such as USAID and the Department of Education, which can be reduced in size and defunded by executive action, but not dismantled. Judicial intervention has countermanded – usually temporarily and subject to review by higher courts – some of DOGE’s sackings and funding freezes.
However, with DOGE Caucuses organised in both houses of Congress specifically to promote its operations, Musk’s efforts are likely to be more popular than the mainstream media claims.
Despite relentless attacks, a poll in February found that 72 per cent of Americans agree that there should be a government agency “focused on efficiency,” while seven in 10 believe that government is “filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency” and 77 per cent say they support a “full examination of all government expenses”.
Whether he stays on the job beyond May 30 or not, Musk may well be able to claim that he has accomplished the greatest reduction in government spending and staffing since the mass demobilisation at the end of the Second World War.
Bear in mind that, while these economies have been implemented over the past ten weeks, Musk led his SpaceX company to save the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, began a technical analysis to determine how a journalist was added to a high-level group chat of Trump administration officers, and suffered a national boycott and domestic terrorist campaign against Tesla, the electric car company he was celebrated for running until he threw in his lot with Trump.
“This is a revolution”, Musk recently told an interviewer. “It might be the biggest revolution in the government since the original revolution … Are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way? Absolutely.”
There have been no shortage of complaints, particularly from those with a vested interest in the continuation of America’s government spending gravy train. But a nation that finds itself $36 trillion in debt should be grateful for Musk’s efforts.