It’s been one week since Elon Musk’s 130-day limit as a Special Government Employee ended and he moved on from his daily leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk was given a Golden Key to the White House along with much thanks and praise at the farewell press conference with Trump.
Fireworks between Musk and President Donald Trump erupted almost immediately with the two trading barbs on X/Twitter over the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. Musk, and frankly some other Republicans, expressed concerns about spending worrying that any successes of DOGE are wiped out in the bill. Demands that more cuts, or at least reductions in increases, be put into the bill to work toward getting the federal budget back on track.
The back and forth between Trump and Musk became personal and heated belying a tiff between two people who had become very close. Those close to the friendship expressed disappointment that this disagreement spilled out into the public view and said they felt the two would likely come back together as friends after a cooling off period.
While all that was happening, DOGE was working quietly in the background towards its goals to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across federal agencies.
Credit Card Diet
The credit card diet continues. Credit Card Update! After 14 weeks, the program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has expanded to 55 agencies resulting in ~610k de-activated cards. As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts; more work to do!
Elimination of Unused Phone Licenses
DOGE eliminated even more unused phone lines. Approximately $800k/year is saved by eliminating ~1,700 unused plans, switching plans for many of the remaining ones, and eliminating 2,218 unused cellular equipment payments.
VOIP licenses were reduced from 9,195 to 2,690, eliminating 6,505 unused/unnecessary subscriptions and saving ~$469k/year. DOGES says it will continue to work agency by agency to identify wasteful IT spending.
Federal Retirement System Goes Digital
On June 2, online digital retirement became the government standard at Federal Retirement System. As of June 2, 65+ year old paper process for filing for retirement benefits will be replaced with an all digital alternative. This will dramatically reduce the average time people wait to receive their benefits.”
Fraud in Federal Student Aid
The US Department of Education (DoE) and DOGE said they “took action on long-running fraud in federal student aid estimated to cost taxpayers > $1B/year and contributed to shortfalls in education funding available to low income students.”
DoE disburses $120 billion in student aid per year between Pell Grants and loans. The fraudsters (largely international crime rings):
- Use stolen SSNs to sign up for online classes at secondary institutions - Use the same SSNs to receive federal student loans or Pell Grants
- Use a chatbot to “show up” for the first few days of classes
- Pocket a portion of the money (which is sent from the federal government to the school to the fake students)
Contracts Update
DOGE said that over the past week agencies terminated 61 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $428M and savings of $255M, including a $71.3k HHS professional services contract for “media training for up to 12 people to enable them to more effectively and clearly communicate to members of the press/reporters”.