Now that Elon Musk has stepped down from his role in the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) he helped establish is collapsing. Many of his allies are being stripped of their credentials, while long-term government employees quietly celebrate. The power dynamic has shifted quite quickly.
How did Musk’s feud with Trump accelerate this purge?
Some are quietly celebrating DOGE’s demise, while others reflect on the devastation it left behind. The Musk-Trump feud appears to have precipitated a broad reversal in DOGE’s influence.
The power of Elon Musk’s US Department of Energy (DOGE) has diminished as senior staffers and cabinet members from the Trump administration have taken back control of the organization, as per the report by The Washington Post.
Longtime aide Steve Davis, attorney James Burnham, and DOGE adviser Katie Miller were among the top lieutenants leaving the government as Musk left.
Are former government employees being rehired?
While unaffiliated political appointees in other departments have been pressuring the cost-cutting group to retreat, cabinet officials are taking steps to rehire employees who had been fired by DOGE, as per the report.
Since he and Trump have turned against one another, Musk’s influence with Trump’s supporters has eroded, according to The Post.
The billionaire even went so far as to imply that there is information about the president in the Jeffrey Epstein files. Given this context, a significant number of high-ranking DOGE employees seem to have been purged.
What’s happening inside federal agencies like the FAA?
One example is the fact that DOGE employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were “stripped of their credentials and user accounts inside the FAA’s internal computer systems” last week, as per a report by Raw Stor
As per the Post, “Theodore Malaska, Brady Glantz, Samuel Smeal, and Tom Kiernan, all of whom work for Musk’s SpaceX, no longer have the title ‘senior adviser to the administrator’ on their online profiles within the agency as of June 2, according to the records.”
According to the records, their profiles no longer display any job title at all, let alone a manager, email address, phone number, or affiliated organization.
The “team owed its creation and power to an executive order, not an act of Congress,” according to insiders, and now that Musk is gone, they are too. According to one manager, “So they’re being pushed out.”
“Some federal employees took a few moments to celebrate the diminishment of DOGE, however brief,” the Post reported. As DOGE appeared to be going out of business, one interior employee claimed that he and his coworkers put in extra effort and enjoyed their government jobs, as per a report.
At the FAA, a group of employees celebrated the expulsion of DOGE employees by going out for drinks after work. After that, they gave a more somber toast to the more than two dozen coworkers they had lost during the journey, as quoted in a report by The Washington Post.