- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.
After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”
Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.
As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.


I’ve seen it first hand. I work as a consultant in public sector. Every where we go now the teams are crippled because people took the buyouts and left. Network teams that were 7 people reduced to 2 that are barely keeping things together. I’m sure NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, etc… love selling all these consulting hours now.
I was at a military industry conference a month or so ago, with several flag level officers giving talks. The total amount of lost years of experience and senior leadership in the military and intelligence agencies is staggering. It is going to take generations to recover.
I’d bet some of those ex government employees are back doing the same job as IBM contractors for 3x the cost.
Yep, exactly. That’s DOGE efficiency.