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 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.

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, Musk's 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 IRS.

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.

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 like 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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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 at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's home and members-only club in Palm Beach. He would spend much of the next two months there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Davis, who was in charge of DOGE operations, spent much of the transition in Washington, vetting prospective staff.

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.

Around that same time, Gleason, a former civil servant and executive at Smith's Nashville, Tennessee-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.

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.

As Washington focused on Trump's inauguration, Musk was already moving into place. His new hires moved into offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House.

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 swarm of young aides were brought on board as part of the staff of the former White House digital office.

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, it was one of the first agencies to be upended.

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

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