DOGE Recap: May 2025
Tracking the Department of Government Efficiency
The DOGE team will only grow stronger over time. The DOGE influence will only grow stronger. I'd liken it to sort of Buddhism. It's like a way of life. So it is permeating throughout the government.
— Elon Musk, May 30, 2025
DOGE Recap: May 2025 (Fifth Monthly Report)
A Month of Transition, Tension, and Tapering Momentum
May 2025 marked a dramatic pivot point for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After six turbulent months of aggressive intervention in federal operations, Elon Musk formally stepped down from his official role—though not from influence. While the machinery of DOGE continues, its future direction now faces serious questions. Leadership turnover, contested savings claims, and deepening legal scrutiny have all begun to temper the once-thunderous pace of reform. The theme of the month: can DOGE institutionalize itself beyond its founder’s outsized presence?
Operating Impacts: Post-Musk Uncertainty and Program Fallout
The month began with quiet, but its closing weeks carried the weight of leadership departure. On May 30, Elon Musk marked the legal end of his 130-day stint as a special government employee. A White House sendoff featured praise from President Trump, a ceremonial “golden key,” and Musk’s own insistence that DOGE must live on without him.1 But he also warned that recent budget decisions by Congress “undermine” the long-term savings potential of the reforms he spearheaded.2
DOGE’s internal structure absorbed another blow when Steve Davis, a long-time Musk ally and senior DOGE director, also exited.3 Their dual departures leave a power vacuum atop a department that had relied heavily on private-sector personalities operating with little traditional oversight. While Musk signaled he would still “advise” from the outside, federal staff now face a new era: DOGE without a daily quarterback.
Meanwhile, the department’s operational fingerprints continued spreading—this time deeper into agency-level control. At the Department of Agriculture, DOGE sign-off remained mandatory for farm loans above $500,000, even as spring planting season intensified. And at the General Services Administration, DOGE led the deactivation of over 523,000 government credit cards in May—an effort to assert control over micro-level expenditures.4 Critics worried this blanket freeze might paralyze day-to-day functions of federal field offices, but DOGE described it as a “necessary correction” to stop leakage in administrative costs.
Volunteer and service organizations continued to reel from April’s cuts. Peace Corps staff reductions took shape mid-month, with many headquarters workers accepting voluntary separation packages. While overseas volunteer deployments were preserved, the loss of institutional memory in D.C. prompted internal fears of long-term destabilization. AmeriCorps’ elimination remained the subject of ongoing lawsuits, but on the ground, the funding uncertainty has already shuttered numerous programs supporting rural development and youth education.
Financial Assessment: Declining Credibility of Savings Claims
As Musk exited his official role, DOGE issued a “scorecard” boasting $175 billion in federal savings since January. These included reductions in lease obligations, canceled contracts, staffing attrition, and regulatory withdrawals. But the release was met with swift skepticism. A widely shared New York Magazine analysis argued that many of these savings were either double-counted, already planned before DOGE, or offset by operational costs elsewhere.
CBS News ran a financial autopsy of DOGE’s first six months. Their reporting concluded that disruptions caused by rushed restructurings, procurement slowdowns, and staff departures may have cost taxpayers more than $135 billion—effectively erasing much of the claimed benefit. Internal watchdogs from the GAO have reportedly launched a quiet review of DOGE’s accounting practices, though no formal report has been issued.
At a systemic level, the contradiction deepened: overall federal spending rose in May, even as DOGE’s targeted reductions rolled forward. Entitlement programs and debt servicing remain untouched by DOGE, and emergency agency spending to compensate for disrupted services—especially in health, housing, and education—has grown quietly in supplemental appropriations. Musk himself, in his farewell press conference, admitted that downsizing the government had proven more difficult than he expected, blaming what he called the “banal evil of bureaucracy.”5
To be sure, DOGE’s influence on federal financial management is both real and far-reaching. The department has forced a long-overdue conversation about legacy inefficiencies in federal spending—challenging assumptions, scrutinizing vendor contracts, and consolidating administrative redundancies that had long escaped political will. By aggressively targeting procurement waste and centralizing oversight of discretionary expenditures, DOGE has succeeded in reducing operational bloat in ways few agencies ever attempt. Yet the true fiscal picture remains deeply complicated. The long-term impact of these reforms depends not just on short-term savings, but on how residual costs, service gaps, and administrative bottlenecks ripple through the system in the months to come. Many of the most consequential effects—like changes in service delivery, emergency appropriations to backfill undercut programs, or public trust in federal institutions—won’t show up until more outcomes are fully experienced. As a result, while critics focus on spurious savings and watchdogs tally deferred costs, DOGE defenders argue that the most meaningful gains may lie in structural habits that outlast today’s numbers.
Legal Issues: Access Fights, Oversight Failures, and State Resistance
DOGE’s entanglement with the judicial branch intensified in May. Key developments include:
May 9: U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order halting the Trump administration’s plans to implement mass layoffs and restructuring across approximately 20 federal agencies. This action was in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of labor unions, non-profit organizations, and local governments challenging the legality of the administration’s DOGE efforts.
May 14: The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a block, allowing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to obtain DOGE’s internal documents, a win for transparency.
May 23: Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused orders requiring DOGE to comply with FOIA requests and related discovery, halting transparency efforts to allow Supreme Court review.
May 30: The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling, denied the Trump administration’s request to lift a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston. This injunction, issued on May 22, 2025, blocked the administration from implementing large-scale reductions in force (RIFs) and reorganizations at multiple federal agencies as part of the DOGE initiatives. The appeals court’s decision emphasized that such significant structural changes to the federal government require Congressional authorization, aligning with Illston’s ruling that the president must work with Congress for large-scale agency overhauls. The court found that the downsizing could cause irreparable harm, affecting critical services like food safety and veteran healthcare, and thus maintained the pause on DOGE-led cuts pending the lawsuit’s resolution. Judge Consuelo Callahan dissented, arguing that the president likely has the authority to downsize the executive branch. The Trump administration indicated it would likely appeal to the Supreme Court to challenge the ruling.6
On another front, a coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia escalated their lawsuit against the administration for its dismantling of AmeriCorps, arguing the move was unconstitutional and violated the Administrative Procedure Act. A preliminary injunction hearing is scheduled for early summer, with major implications for how executive authority can interpret or nullify congressionally funded programs.
Conclusion: May's Turning Point in the DOGE Experiment
May 2025 will likely be remembered as the month DOGE pivoted from a founder-led crusade to a more uncertain bureaucratic experiment. Musk is out—officially, at least. Davis is out too. The flash of celebrity-led reform is now dimmer. What remains is a growing paper trail of disrupted programs, contested budgetary claims, and mounting legal challenges.
What happens next? Much depends on whether DOGE can evolve from a headline-generating disruptor into a functionally embedded, legally sound engine for real institutional reform. But without its charismatic founder at the helm—and with Congress slowly reasserting its constitutional muscles—DOGE’s second act may look less like a revolution and more like a contested renovation.
Press conference on Musk departure from DOGE:
Notes:
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Previous DOGE recap reports:
January 2025 (First Monthly Report)
February 2025 (Second Monthly Report)
March 2025 (Third Monthly Report)
As a conservative/libertarian, I applauded the DOGE format, but to brag about cutting a certain amount from government spending is egotistical. I thought DOGE would audit, find the areas of abuse, which are many, and it would be up to congress to react and enact legislation to correct the abuses. Trump can't do it all with executive orders. However congress with its divisions of right and left, will in the end do nothing. The dems will not do anything in this regard because it comes from Trump and makes them look bad, and there are too many rinos in rep seats that side with the dems. The Beautiful Big Spending bill, from what I am seeing, is just another attempt to look good while spending more. Everything that comes out of Washington is hot air and privileged spending. As long as the feds can spend willy-nilly with a Fed Reserve providing ever devalued funds, the country will continue sliding down the slippery slope to destruction.
A German substack wrote this:
"Musk has now officially declared DOGE to be finished"
The rest of the article pointed out the failures of DOGE: it was supposed to save two trillion dollars, the government budget deficit in just May 2025 was 258 billion dollars (more than Elon's most optimistic claims for cuts in the past five months).
The printing presses roll on creating more money, which means more inflation and the continuation of this downward spiral.