President Trump’s DOGE had another busy week exposing waste, fraud, and abuse.
DOGE is not slowing down and, if anything, is speeding up its investigation into how the American people's tax dollars have been misused at home and abroad.
The South Shore Press weekly DOGE report brings you the highlights of what DOGE revealed over the last week.
This week, besides numerous revelations of rogue spending programs, DOGE won several significant court cases and launched administrative actions furthering the DOGE effort.
"We’re fighting Matrix big time here," Musk said. "It has got to be done," said Musk in a speech where he received the ‘Golden Chain Saw” from Argentina's President Javier Milei.
DOGE won an important case in court this week from an Obama-appointed judge, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper. Judge Cooper ruled against five federal labor unions that sued to stop firings of probationary federal employees and the deferred resignation program that told workers to either come back to the office or resign.
Then, Saturday night, DOGE, through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), sent an email to all federal workers saying, “As part of the Trump Administration’s commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce, OPM is asking employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week by the end of Monday, cc’ing their manager.”
Employees are asked to send approximately five bullet points describing what they did the week before. DOGE said that non-responses will be considered as resignations. DOGE’s request and quick turnaround for the email response are meant to shock the broken and abused system.
Musk said on X, “The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all! In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, also an Obama appointee, handed DOGE another win by denying requests to prevent DOGE from reviewing data within the Department of Education, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation and Department of Commerce.
In another win in court, District Judge John Bates denied requests to deny DOGE from accessing records at the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Several unions and not-for-profit organizations had filed suit.
Arguments that DOGE is acting without authority were rebuffed with the court ruling that DOGE is an agency of the executive branch and is allowed to send its staff to monitor other departments of the government.
Along the way, mistakes have been made when some essential employees have been given notice. When the errors were found, DOGE and the agencies acted quickly to reverse those terminations. DOGE and Musk maintain that in such a large effort to right-size the government and stop waste, fraud, and abuse mistakes will happen. Musk said from the Oval Office that when they make a mistake, they will correct it quickly, and they have.