President Donald Trump announced that he told billionaire Elon Musk to hire an additional 45 new DOGE agents to manage and audit the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon.
Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is now focusing on some of the biggest projects the government has going on, after starting by looking at programs that didn’t cost much.
Trump told DOGE to find ways to cut costs and streamline the government. According to The Wall Street Journal, in the first three weeks of the second Trump administration, DOGE has found and cut more than $1 billion in spending.
DOGE says it has found savings of more than half of those savings are linked to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The Journal said that DOGE’s tech team has been working on “low-hanging fruit” at several agencies so far.
“Great coordination across 35 agencies over the last two days to terminate 199 wasteful contracts saving ~$250mm, including: -Contract for ‘Asia Pacific – Sri Lanka climate change mitigation adaption and resilience coordinator services for forest service’ -Workshop for ‘Intercultural communication diversity dialogue circle communicating across differences,’” DOGE posted Friday night on X.
Elon Musk wants to find $2 trillion in spending cuts. DOGE could find bigger savings in some of the government’s biggest programs, especially those that deal with health care.
The Journal reported that DOGE is also working with the General Services Administration (GSA), which is in charge of managing government buildings and commercial property, to find leases that can be canceled or let lapse.
DOGE has run into trouble. Trump said the U.S. Agency for International Development is full of fraud, waste, and corruption, so on Friday a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that stopped him from destroying the agency.
Trump disagreed with a federal judge’s decision that the Treasury Department should keep people from using its payment systems who are “not civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties.”
“I disagree with it 100 percent; I think it’s crazy. We have to solve the efficiency problem; we have to solve the fraud, waste, abuse,” Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier when asked for his take on the ruling in a pre-taped interview that aired Sunday.
He later told reporters on Sunday that the decision made him sad and that it was an embarrassment, The Hill reported.
“When a president can’t look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don’t have a country anymore. So, we’re very disappointed with the judges that would make such a ruling, but we have a long way to go. We have to look; we have to find all of the fraud that’s going on. We have tremendous fraud, tremendous waste and tremendous abuse and theft, by the way,” Trump said.
“No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision, it’s a disgrace,” Trump added.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer made a clear decision overnight on Saturday that special government employees and those detailed from outside the department are not allowed to access Treasury Department systems. This includes Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
In his interview with Fox, Trump also said that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was “fraudulent.” USAID has been largely shut down as DOGE takes over several departments to cut costs.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in money that’s going to places where it shouldn’t be going,” Trump said. “It’s a big scam.”
“There’s some good money and we can do that through any one of a number — I think I’d rather give it to Marco Rubio over at the State Department, let him take care of the few good ones,” Trump said.
Engelmayer, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, said that anyone who is now blocked must delete any content they have already downloaded right away.
Musk asked Engelmayer to be removed from his job on Sunday, calling him “corrupt” and saying that he was “protecting corruption.”
Judge who is permanently overseeing the case brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general will hold a hearing in New York on Friday to decide whether to grant a longer pause. Until then, the ruling will stand.
Musk’s attempts to get into the systems of several federal agencies have led to a number of lawsuits. Democrats are especially worried about DOGE’s ability to access the payment systems of the Treasury Department.
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A group of unions filed a lawsuit, and the Trump administration agreed earlier this week to limit the access of two people to the Treasury Department’s payment systems until the case moves on to the next stage.
DOGE has accelerated its work in recent weeks.
In its first two weeks of operation, DOGE eliminated around $1 billion in spending by canceling 85 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEI)-related contracts.
The cuts came across 24 federal agencies, which included the Department of Education, Department of Labor, Treasury, Defense, USDA, Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Through 1/29/2025, 85 DEIA-related contracts totaling ~$1B have been terminated within the Dept. of Ed, GSA, OPM, EPA, DoL, Treasury, DoD, USDA, Commerce, DHS, VA, HHS, State, NSF, NRC, NLRB, PBGC, USAID, RRB, SSA, SBA, BLM, CFPB, NPS, and NOAA,” the department said on X.
The Office of Personnel Management was hit with some of the biggest cuts, as close to $500 million in contracts were canceled.
The Department of Agriculture was next as it was nearly $110 million in canceled contracts and spending.
Other cuts included the Department of Homeland Security, which saw a reduction in spending of 14.9 million; the Department of Health and Human Services cut $28.1 million; the Department of Labor eliminated $7.8 million; the Department of Treasury cut $25.2 million; the Environmental Protection Agency saw a reduction of $3 million in spending; the Department of Education cut $3.8 million; and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saw cuts of $45 million.