How DOGE cracked Washington: A focus on arcane agencies gave Musk and his allies swift control of government nerve centers

Not officially, at least.

Elon Musk is not the administrator of the US DOGE Service, the agency that houses the temporary Department of Government Efficiency. He’s not even a DOGE employee, according to the White House.

In fact, the world’s richest man, who was named by President Donald Trump to lead DOGE in November, who posts about it dozens of times a day, who talks publicly about the agency using the pronoun “we,” and who even conducted an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office with Trump, has “no greater authority than other senior White House advisors,” according to a sworn statement submitted in court this week by a White House personnel official.

The administration’s decision to downplay Musk’s role in legal filings, even as Trump continues to say that Musk’s “in charge” of DOGE, as he did on Wednesday, has puzzled a Washington still very much trying to divine the operation’s next moves. More critically, it’s also drawn the skepticism of a federal judge.

But the mixed messages do offer a valuable window into how the White House laid the groundwork for its shock-and-awe campaign, including what has, up to this point, been an underappreciated level of preparation in the deployment of key appointees inside specific agencies.

CNN interviews with multiple government officials, plus a review of hundreds of court documents, employment agreements, agency directories and executive branch memos shed new light on the behind-the-scenes preparation and strategy behind DOGE, choreographed, structured, and executed to take swift control of Washington nerve centers.

That plan has undeniably – and intentionally – minimized transparency while also maximizing the free rein Musk’s allies have wielded across the federal bureaucracy.

Despite their relative lack of government experience, political appointees with deep ties to Musk, his companies or other major tech firms now sit in key leadership positions across agencies that comprise the federal government’s personnel, technology, property and acquisition operations.

The organization that works day-to-day at DOGE’s official home hasn’t been publicly laid out by the White House. But according to multiple sources familiar with the organization, the operation is lean by design, with its central office populated primarily by lawyers and younger staff members.

More senior members of the official operation have spent the opening weeks of the administration splitting time between their offices in the cavernous Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.

A cadre of young technology engineers have fanned out across multiple agencies over the past month, appearing in organizational directories with different agency-specific email addresses. Some of those engineers, according to disclosures made public in court filings the last several weeks, are detailed to operate in multiple agencies simultaneously.

Targeting key agencies

Their work has been accelerated by political appointees who took control of agencies including the General Services Administration and Office of Personnel Management on Inauguration Day. OPM in particular has served as a cornerstone of a carefully calibrated interplay between Trump’s expansive executive orders and DOGE’s role in carrying out – or in many cases, enforcing – their intent.

OPM, where some of Musk’s closest advisers hold senior roles, has churned out a steady stream of guidance memos to institute the proposed “buyout” offers for federal workers and required agencies to submit lists of probationary employees that ended up serving as a precursor to the mass layoffs that have followed.

 

 

OPM also served as the point agency behind the White House move to quickly expand the reach of political appointees aligned with DOGE’s mandate. Hours after Trump signed the executive order creating the agenda, OPM’s newly installed acting director circulated a memo addressed to all department and agency heads that dramatically increased their ability to quickly fill out senior roles with political appointees across the executive branch.

The move, which was explained in the memo as necessary to “drive the unusually expansive and transformative agenda the American people elected President Trump to accomplish,” sped up the implementation of Trump’s actions while the Senate considers hundreds of Trump’s nominees.

To the degree the connective tissue between Trump’s appointees and the DOGE operation wasn’t clear, Trump moved this month to remove any grey area with an additional executive order that explicitly granted the agency vast authority over the shape of the government workforce. The order was signed at the same moment large-scale cuts were being carried out across federal agencies.

“President Trump promised the American people he would establish a Department of Government Efficiency, overseen by Elon Musk, to make the federal government more efficient and accountable to taxpayers,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to CNN. “With Elon as a special government employee at the White House, and political appointees onboarding at federal agencies to assist President Trump’s cabinet secretaries, DOGE has fully integrated into the federal government to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Leavitt’s statement, on its face, appears to run counter to what the administration submitted in court just a few days ago. But Musk’s official position as a special government employee operating within the White House and not tied explicitly to DOGE, appears intentional in its design.

A special government employee is allowed to maintain their private sector employment – which in Musk’s case include a collection of space, electric vehicle, AI and social media companies worth billions of dollars.

Outwardly leaderless

While DOGE may be “overseen” by Musk, as Leavitt says, the official DOGE apparatus is outwardly leaderless and under the umbrella of the White House. The effect is an operation difficult to penetrate through public records requests, difficult to pin down for lawmakers pledging oversight, and more complicated to challenge via the legal process.

As DOGE personnel move from agency to agency, their methods have come to resemble a “copy-paste” like approach as they immediately seek access to IT systems and closely held databases. OPM, operating in parallel, fired off a memo to all agency heads recommending the position of chief information officer should be classified as a political appointment. Many of those positions had long been the domain of career employees.

OPM had already removed the career official serving as the agency’s CIO in the first days of the Trump administration. A political appointee, Greg Hogan, was installed in the role. Hogan came with more than two decades of private sector experience and computer engineering background. He also most recently worked for a software developer that was at one point run by one of Musk’s close advisers, Riccardo Biasini.

Biasini, who worked for Musk’s The Boring Company, also joined OPM as a senior advisor.

A similar playbook was implemented immediately at GSA, the sprawling agency with a central role in federal contracting, management of the federal property portfolio and providing the technology systems across the government.

Political appointees from the private sector arrived to fill the agency’s top leadership and advisor positions in Trump’s first days in office and have pledged dramatic changes. Steve Davis, who is viewed around Washington as the operational driver of the DOGE strategy, has an agency e-mail address and has worked from its headquarters, according to people briefed on the planning. Davis has been one of Musk’s closest confidantes for two decades.

Nicole Hollander, Davis’s partner who managed the real estate portfolio for X under Musk, has taken up a similar role at GSA and is listed in the agency directory.

Insulating DOGE within the White House

The day Trump took office, he signed the executive order retrofitting Musk’s brainchild to an office created by President Barack Obama called US Digital Service. The president, in comments to reporters at the time, implied that Musk would be working at a building next door to the White House, where he’d oversee an office of about 20 people.

But a month later, it’s now clear that DOGE has taken a very different shape. Musk has an office in the West Wing, and last week, he evangelized DOGE’s mission from the Oval Office, as Trump looked on from the Resolute Desk. Musk vowed then that “we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.”

 

Still, the White House has declined to detail the organization’s personnel or structure beyond Trump’s executive order establishing its existence and the position that it is Trump who is directing the operations.

“Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people and their obstructionist efforts will fail,” Leavitt said in her statement to CNN, adding that Trump “will continue to direct this effort until our government is truly for the people, and by the people.

Crucially, however, the executive order housed DOGE within the executive office of the president. That insulates its operations from federal records requests until long after its 18-month existence expires, due to the Presidential Records Act.

The wave of initial Inauguration Day legal challenges to DOGE, meanwhile, have stalled out, because they were built on the expectation – now proven wrong – that DOGE would operate as a singular committee, led by Musk, that would advise Trump and his administration.

Musk’s murky White House role aside, the work of DOGE has been carried out by officials who arrived at agencies in recent weeks, with aides working in small teams to access IT systems and databases in pursuit of compliance with the mission laid out in Trump’s executive order.

The court fights over those Musk allies’ access to sensitive government data has forced the administration to vaguely describe DOGE’s imprint across certain agencies. At the Treasury Department, technology executive Thomas Krause is officially a Treasury employee and serves as the senior advisor for technology and modernization. He has also been delegated the duties of the department’s fiscal assistant secretary, marking the first time on record a political appointee has held the role that has long served as Treasury’s highest ranking career post.

That post was vacant due to Krause’s other role at the department: DOGE Team lead. Krause, who was appointed to Treasury as a special government employee, clashed with the career official who held that position over access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems. That official, David Lebryk, was subsequently placed on administrative leave and retired, ending a career stretching more than three decades of government service.

Lebryk’s role in the three prior administrations, including all four years of Trump’s first term, oversaw the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Those authorities are now under Krause, who will soon be joined by a new Treasury employee tied to DOGE – a robotics engineer who worked for the defense technology company Anduril who will serve as Treasury’s “DOGE Team” engineer, according to a court filing this week.

Treasury is also in the process of onboarding additional DOGE Team employees to join its work already in its opening stages at the IRS, according to court filings.

There are six individuals, referenced in court filings, at the Department of Education carrying out DOGE’s mission: Two are department employees, two are detailed from other agencies and two are detailed from the US DOGE Service. Meanwhile, three DOGE detailees have landed at the Department of Labor.

Those individuals have mostly gone unnamed in court filings. But their presence has been described in declarations by Adam Ramada, a 35-year-old who previously worked in Miami at a venture capital firm. Ramada himself is doing DOGE’s work at both the Education and Labor departments, according to his declarations, and potentially at a third agency, with his name also listed in the Department of Energy’s directory, according to two sources with access to the document.

The Justice Department, in its court filings, has repeatedly cited declarations from DOGE employees that their roles exist subject to that agency’s regulations and operate within its chain of command. That argument seems to have resonated with at least some of the judges who have balked at requests for temporary restraining orders that would curtail DOGE’s operations.

DOGE’s nerve center in Washington

Powering DOGE’s far-reaching sweep across the federal government is a central engine running out of OPM and GSA.

At a court hearing on Wednesday, a Justice Department attorney, referring to OPM, said that the “entire” agency “is really working on these DOGE executive orders and working on the president’s directives.”

The final shape of what DOGE implements remains an open question, though Musk has hardly been circumspect about the scale of his ambition for the operation over the course of its 18-month assignment. The official DOGE X account posts a steady stream of contracts they say have been canceled and workforce reductions they say have been implemented, but the accounting remains difficult given the speed, scale and opacity of their actions.

More sunlight could be coming to how DOGE’s machinery has been assembled, as several judges are considering orders requiring the administration to produce more information – including, potentially, internal emails and other communications – that would explain who was deployed where and why.

The administration is resisting the push for a fuller factual record at this phase in the legal disputes. In one such filing, the Justice Department told the court that she could make a ruling “based on the parties’ filings to date.”