The big balls were just the beginning

From the beginning In the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, periodically generating claims — most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management — that the group does not exist, or has disappeared altogether.

But DOGE is not dead. Many of its original members work full-time at various government agencies, and the New National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, a close ally of Musk.

Even if DOGE cannot survive another year, or until the U.S. sesquicentennial — its original expiration date, according to the executive order that created it — the organization’s larger project will continue. DOGE has been used since its inception for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the wholesale consolidation of data in the service of concentrating power in the executive branch. It’s a pattern that experts say may extend beyond the Trump administration.

“I think it changed the parameters of where legislative authority ends and executive authority begins, simply by ignoring those criteria,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “This won’t necessarily be limited to Republican administrations. There will be Democratic presidents in the future who will say, ‘Well, the Department of Defense was able to do this, so why can’t we?’

The first days DOGE featured a chaotic onslaught in which small teams of DOGE agents, such as the now-famous Edward “Big Balls” Koristin, were deployed across government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing workers, and cutting contracts. Although these moves were often radical, if not seemingly illegal, as matters of bureaucratic processes, they were in the service of what had been the Trump administration’s agenda all along.

Goals such as cutting discretionary spending and significantly reducing the size of the federal workforce have already been championed by people like Vice President J.D. Vance, who in 2021 called for the “de-Baathification” of the government, and Russell Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These goals were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought was not the end, but the means – its unique insight was that control of technical infrastructure, something that can be achieved with a small group, functionally amounts to control of government.

“There has never been a unit of government given so much power to essentially overturn government agencies with so little oversight,” Moynihan says.

Under the Constitution, the authority to create and fund federal agencies comes from Congress. But Trump and many of the people who support him, including Vaught and Vance, adhere to what was until relatively recently a fringe view of how government should be run: the unitary executive theory. This assumes that the president, like the CEO of a corporation, has near-total control over the executive branch, of which federal agencies are a part, a power more like that of a king than the person described in the nation’s founding documents.