Elon Musk’s Department of Government Inefficiency

In the month since DOGE got up and running, federal workers have been thrown into various forms of turmoil. It’s having real-world effects.

Elon Musk showed up in Washington in January on a promise to streamline the federal government and make it run more efficiently. But over the course of just five weeks, he’s accomplished precisely the opposite: a massive and unnecessary time suck that’s pulled federal employees away from their duties on a daily basis.

Firing essential workers who need to then be rehired. Distracting agencies with directives that are reversed and then reversed again. Forcing workers back into offices where they don’t have enough desks. And provoking countless agency meetings where managers are unable to answer basic questions about the White House’s latest move. On and on it goes.

“The meetings are as clear as mud,” said Sheria Smith, a civil rights attorney at the Department of Education in Texas and president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. “No one knows anything. … People are being released from duty, then returned to duty. We don’t know who’s calling the shots. It’s just wildly inefficient.”

She added, “How can you be on task when you don’t even know from hour to hour whether you’re going to [have a job]?”

President Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to fire a lot of people and shrink the federal workforce, which numbers around 2.4 million, excluding the U.S. Postal Service. So far the administration has terminated thousands of people through legally dubious layoffs and tried to push out tens of thousands more through the also legally dubious deferred resignation program known as “Fork in the Road.”