Elon Musk’s Efficiency Agency Turns Out to Be Just Another Scam

The much-discussed Department of Government Efficiency is finally coming to fruition—but it’s not the stringent, $2 trillion cost-cutting agency that Elon Musk had promised.

Instead, the executive order Donald Trump signed Monday night officially actualizing the executive branch division is a simple rebrand of something that already exists: the U.S. Digital Service, which has little to do with budget cuts.

“The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” the executive order reads.

Part of the mandate includes the development of a subagency, named the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which will be “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.” The temporary subagency will expire on July 4, 2026. The administrator overseeing DOGE will report to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

And in reality, it appears that more bureaucracy will be on the agenda for the memeified division: The executive order requires the hiring of four-person “DOGE teams” for each agency (very efficient, much cost-cutting). They will include an agency-related team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist, and an attorney, per the order, all in an effort to further advance Trump’s vague and unclear DOGE agenda.

Another executive order further grants DOGE a level of responsibility for enacting a federal hiring plan.

“The Federal Hiring Plan shall provide specific best practices for the human resources function in each agency, which each agency head shall implement, with advice and recommendations as appropriate from DOGE,” the order, titled “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” reads.

The first job gutted by DOGE was apparently one of its own potential co-chairs, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy’s, who was ousted from Trumpworld in recent weeks for seemingly grating on the “rank and file” of the cost-cutting department. Last week, Trump personally implored Ramaswamy to consider taking Ohio’s Senate seat, recently vacated by Vice President JD Vance, if it was offered to him by Governor Mike DeWine. (Of course, it wasn’t, and the billionaire is instead expected to announce a bid to replace the term-limited governor in 2026.)

Musk has promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget under the helm of the agency, a sum that constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending. Doing so would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and all federal agencies.

On the second day of his presidency, Donald Trump secured yet another victory from his ally Judge Aileen Cannon.

Cannon on Tuesday blocked the Justice Department from sharing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Trump’s classified documents case with select members of Congress. The move is the latest example of Cannon’s deferential treatment to the president, including dismissing the classified documents case six months ago.

While Cannon didn’t block the entire report, protecting a selected volume is certainly to Trump’s advantage. Appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020, Cannon presided over his classified documents case and helped the president every step of the way, drawing criticism even from Trump’s former lawyers.

Smith resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month and in November ended his cases on Trump’s 2020 election meddling and hoarding of classified documents. However, he wasn’t issued a preemptive presidential pardon by President Biden, unlike others, and may find himself targeted by Trump’s Justice Department.

The report is the last unresolved part of the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were rendered moot by his election victory in November. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Trump will likely never see any legal consequences from the crimes he allegedly committed, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. For the next four years, as Trump repeatedly stretches the law to his advantage, the public will ask what could have been done to hold him accountable after 2020.

This story has been updated.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is threatening to bring news outlets that accurately report on Elon Musk’s horrific Sieg Heil before Congress.

PBS News shared an unedited clip on X Monday of the billionaire technocrat speaking at a post-inauguration event for Donald Trump, when he did “what appeared to be a fascist salute,” the outlet wrote.

Musk “[put] his hand on his chest and then [raised] it in a salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by Nazis at their victory rallies,” PBS wrote.

And Musk didn’t just do it once; he did it twice in a row.

But PBS’s reporting includes the essential word “appeared,” which is typically used by journalists to indicate that while describing something cannot necessarily determine its nature, one can understand something’s nature through describing it.

One might write that it was a Sieg Heil because that’s clearly what it was. But many outlets are declining to do so, for a slate of reasons that range from an abundance of caution to blatant cowardice. Fox News, for example, suggested that Musk—who previously voiced his support for Germany’s far-right party and a British neo-Nazi—had simply made a “questionable salute.”

Greene, who has pushed her own antisemitic conspiracy theories from time to time, came to Musk’s rescue from the dastardly American public broadcaster.

“As the Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE, I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds. We will be in touch soon,” Greene wrote Monday night.

Greene would have PBS testify to the dispassionate description of Musk’s apparent triumphant fascist salute, as if Congress doesn’t have enough of its own problems right now.

Not only is it not surprising that Greene would defend Musk from allegations of Nazism, it’s also not surprising that a MAGA Republican would target PBS. Trump has previously attacked publicly funded media such as NPR and PBS, and ye olde authoritarian playbook for Trump’s incoming administration, Project 2025, called for the government to strip federal funding and licenses for noncommercial education stations.

Donald Trump on Monday pardoned or commuted the sentences of every single person criminally charged for the January 6 insurrection. Known violent extremists are now walking free.

Trump’s sweeping pardon affects more than 1,500 defendants—including some of the most notorious.

Enrique Tarrio, the former national leader of the Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy over his role in planning January 6, is now a free man. So is Guy Reffitt, a Three Percenter who touted a gun and helped lead the rioters to the Capitol. The baseball bat–wielding Jake Lang is also free after continuing his alt-right activities from prison. Julian Khater, who pepper-sprayed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick in the face, was similarly freed. Sicknick died the day after the attack.

Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, who stormed through a shattered window in the Senate building, was pardoned of his 10-year sentence. Fellow Proud Boys Ethan Nordean and Joe Biggs, who coordinated breaches of police lines, were also pardoned.  

A notable commutation was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whom a federal judge described as “frightening.” 

Trump delivered quickly on a core campaign promise, issuing the pardons within hours of his swearing in. This is a massive level of vindication for a group who viewed themselves as the victims the entire time. 

Donald Trump has been in office for less than 24 hours, but his administration is already working overtime to strip personnel from the executive branch who “are not aligned” with Trump’s “vision to Make America Great Again.”

In a late-night post to Truth Social, the forty-seventh president promised that his Presidential Personnel Office is “actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration.” That staggering number includes four people whom Trump felt compelled to call out by name: José Andrés from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition; Mark Milley from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council; Brian Hook from the Wilson Center for Scholars; and Keisha Lance Bottoms from the President’s Export Council.

“YOU’RE FIRED!” Trump wrote.

On Monday, Trump effectively reinstated Schedule F by an executive order under a different name, streamlining the process of ridding the executive branch of employees that he considers disloyal. And if Project 2025—the presidential transition blueprint that Trump and his allies have since fessed up is more or less the plan—are anything to go by, that could ultimately involve replacing tens of thousands of career employees with 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists. In July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts promised the project had already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees.

Minutes after Trump was sworn in, a portrait hanging in the Pentagon of former Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley—who refused Trump’s orders to send the military to crush protesters in Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and who has since referred to Trump as a “fascist” and a “wannabe dictator”—was suddenly stripped from the wall. (Former President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Milley on Monday, saving him from the Trump administration’s litigious ire.)

But the forced exit didn’t seem to bother everyone on the receiving end of it. The first person named in Trump’s post, Andrés, wrote later on X that he had already submitted his resignation last week, since his two-year term had expired.

“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members—unpaid volunteers like me—were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day,” Andres wrote. “May God give you the wisdom, Mr. President, to put politics and name calling aside … and instead lift up the everyday people working to bring America together. Let’s build longer tables.”

Bottoms similarly quit weeks before Trump supposedly ousted her. On Tuesday, the former Atlanta mayor shared her resignation notice to the Biden administration, dated January 4.

Trump has repeatedly promised to enact revenge on individuals he deemed to be “enemies of the state.” In the weeks leading up to the election, former Trump White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews warned that the ex-reality TV star had morphed from someone with a vision for America into a vindictive far-right ideologue “hellbent on revenge and retribution.”

This story has been updated.