The big balls were just the beginning

From the beginning For the Trump administration, so-called Government Efficiency Department (DOGE), the brainchild of a billionaire elon musk, It has gone through many iterations, periodically giving rise to claims –Recently From the Director of the Office of Personnel Management that the group does not exist, or has disappeared completely.

but Doug isn’t dead. Many of its original members work full-time at various government agencies, and the New National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, a close ally of Musk.

Even if DOGE doesn’t stick around for another year, or until the U.S. quincentennial, its original expiration date, according to Executive order Established – The larger project of the organization will continue. DOGE has been used since its inception for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the wholesale consolidation of data in the service of concentrating power in the executive branch. It’s a pattern that experts say may extend beyond the Trump administration.

“I think it changed the parameters of where legislative authority ends and executive authority begins, simply by ignoring those criteria,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “This won’t necessarily be limited to Republican administrations. There will be Democratic presidents in the future who will say, ‘Well, the Department of Defense was able to do this, so why can’t we?’

The first days From DOGE it was It has a chaotic attack Where small teams of DOGE agents, like the now infamous Edward “Big Balls” CoristinThey have been deployed across government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing workers, and canceling contracts. Although these moves were often radical, if not seemingly illegal, as matters of bureaucratic processes, they were in the service of what had been the Trump administration’s agenda all along.

Goals such as cutting discretionary spending and dramatically reducing the size of the federal workforce have already been supported by people like Vice President J.D. Vance, who in 2021 called for “De-Baathification” in the government, and Russell Foote, who is now head of the Office of Management and Budget. These goals were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought was not the end, but the means—its unique insight that control of technical infrastructure, something that can be achieved with a small group, functionally amounts to control of government.

“There has never been a unit of government given so much power to essentially overturn government agencies with so little oversight,” Moynihan says.

Under the Constitution, the authority to create and fund federal agencies comes from Congress. But Trump and many of the people who support him, including Vaught and Vance, adhere to what until relatively recently was a fringe view of how government should be run: Unitary executive theory. This assumes that the president, like the CEO of a corporation, has near-total control over the executive branch, of which federal agencies are a part, a power more like that of a king than the person described in the nation’s founding documents.