The big balls were just the beginning

From the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Ministry of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), the brainchild of a billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, periodically leading to complaints:most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management – ​​that the group does not exist, or has completely disappeared.

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

Even if DOGE doesn’t survive another year, or until the United States’ half-fiftieth anniversary, its original expiration date, according to the decree by establishing it, the larger project of the organization will continue. Since its inception, DOGE has been used for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the massive consolidation of data in the service of the concentration of power in the executive branch. Experts say this trend could extend beyond the Trump administration.

“I think it changed the norms about when legislative power ends and executive power begins simply by ignoring those norms,” says Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s not necessarily going to be limited to Republican administrations. There will be future Democratic presidents who say, ‘Well, DOGE was able to do it, why can’t we?'”

The first days of DOGE were characterized by a chaotic blitz in which small teams of DOGE agents, such as the now infamous Edward “Big Balls” Coristinehave been deployed across government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing employees and eliminating contracts. And while these measures were often radical, even illegal, from a bureaucratic operational standpoint, they furthered what had always been the Trump administration’s agenda.

Goals such as reducing discretionary spending and drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce had previously 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 objectives were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought was not the end, but the means: its unique vision was that control of technical infrastructure, something achievable with a small group, was functionally equivalent to controlling the government.

“Never has a unit of government been given so much power to fundamentally disrupt government agencies with so little oversight,” Moynihan says.

Under the Constitution, the power to create and fund federal agencies rests with Congress. But Trump and many of those who support him, including Vought and Vance, adhere to what was until relatively recently a fringe vision of how government should be run: the unitary executive theory. This posits that, much like the CEO of a corporation, the president has almost complete control over the executive branch, of which federal agencies are a part – a power that more closely resembles that of a king than that described in the nation’s founding documents.