Musk’s DOGE Goons Get a Taste of Their Own Medicine With Loyalty Tests
White House officials are grilling DOGE members on whether they’re loyal to President Trump or Elon Musk.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The tables have officially turned for DOGE.
The Elon Musk acolytes who just months ago were loyalty-testing non-partisan career civil servants are now being forced to prove their own loyalty to President Donald Trump.
Ever since Musk and Trump’s nuclear falling-out last month, staffers brought in by the Tesla chief as part of the “department” of government efficiency have been called into private meetings and grilled on whether they are loyal to Musk or Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Some White House officials want to sideline DOGE—a nebulous cost-cutting task force operating out of the Executive Office of the President—over concerns that they’re still loyal to their old boss, sourced told the Journal.
The paper reported that agency heads have been given more control over DOGE staffers embedded within their agencies and can even get rid of them if they want to. Last month, Social Security Administrator Frank Bisignano did just that with a DOGE staffer.
DOGE staffers are being forced to declare their loyalty to their former boss or to President Donald Trump.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The situation is a marked departure from the halcyon days of March and April, when DOGE had the White House’s blessing to seize federal agencies, fire federal employees and replace them with MAGA loyalists, and use artificial intelligence to secretly monitor whether government employees were loyal to Musk and Trump.
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On his first day in office, Trump renamed the White House’s existing digital services office the “DOGE Service” and tasked it with modernizing federal technology and software to make the government more efficient and productive.
With his campaign megadonor Musk in charge, the office’s mandate quickly grew to weeding out “waste, fraud and abuse” in government, and the Tesla chief vowed to slash $1 trillion-plus in government spending. The secretive group began attempting to purge the federal workforce, eliminate federal agencies and cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts.
But by the time Musk’s temporary government employee status expired in late May, DOGE had found just $190 billion in alleged savings, and even that number has been called into question.
Soon after Musk left the White House to focus on running his companies Tesla and SpaceX, the two men had an ugly falling out over the president’s “big beautiful” spending bill that culminated with Musk announcing his own political party last week.
Now, administration officials have begun scrutinizing DOGE’s cuts and reversing them in some cases, the Journal reported. Trump has also told aides he’s no longer interested in the aggressive and arguably reckless Silicon Valley-style approach that Musk brought to his role.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the Journal in a statement, “Many Presidents have promised, but none other than President Trump has delivered to actually make government more efficient and root out waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington, and that mission is moving full steam ahead.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to DOGE and the White House for comment.
Some DOGE staffers say they want to remain in government to carry out DOGE’s original IT-focused mission, but officials question how they can trust workers who remain loyal to Musk, sources told the Journal.
Elon Musk waived around a chainsaw during this year's Conservative Political Action Conference as a symbol of the cuts he was making to the federal government.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Adding to the paranoia are signs that Musk and his former lieutenant Steve Davis, who also left the government in May, are trying to influence DOGE despite their ostensible returns to the private sector. Davis regularly gives DOGE officials instructions despite no longer being a government employee, sources told the Journal.
After Musk began attacking Trump on social media on June 5, Davis—who was no longer a government employee—texted an associate, “This is obviously beyond crazy. But mission and actions remain the same until we are forced out.”
Five days later, Musk and Davis encouraged key DOGE employees to stay the course and assured them that Musk continued to support their work, the Journal reported.
Some senior DOGE officials responded by rejecting the idea that Davis still had any authority over them. They also told the White House they were worried about Davis continuing to have access to sensitive government data through his DOGE contacts.
In both cases, Davis tried unsuccessfully to get them fired despite, again, no longer working for the government, according to the Journal.
A Musk and Davis ally told the newspaper that Davis doesn’t give directions and only has informal conversations with current DOGE staffers. Some White House officials, however, claim that Musk and Davis are trying to stay entrenched in the government in order to benefit their business interests.
According to the Journal, the situation has created infighting and paranoia among DOGE staffers.
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