What the Hell Happened to DOGE?

While there are many political and policy victories Trump supporters can point to after his first year back in office, there are also questions about what might have been. A lingering one is often uttered in the form of a sigh: “What the hell happened to DOGE?”

Elon Musk first suggested the Department of Government Efficiency to Trump during the 2024 campaign. A government agency specifically tasked with downsizing bloated federal agencies and rooting out fraud was politically popular, and signing an executive order establishing the agency was one of Trump’s first actions upon being sworn in.

DOGE came out swinging and had some notable early successes. It played an active role in dismantling USAID, which conservatives had long accused of engaging in malign political activities under the guise of international charity. (Former USAID employees are still desperately litigating the agency’s closure.) DOGE also quickly identified an appalling, and possibly illegal, scheme by Biden officials to hide $20 billion in environmental grants from the incoming Trump Administration by parking the funds at a financial institution outside the government. Some $2 billion of those funds were earmarked for organizations connected to Georgia Democratic Party gadfly Stacey Abrams, despite the fact she had no experience in environmental work. Thanks to DOGE, Trump’s EPA recovered the funds.

But after a slew of lawsuits, a torrent of hostile publicity, and some missteps by those at the agency, DOGE has all but vanished from the political conversation. The lack of attention is partly due to its responsibilities being pared back after the upstart agency’s ambitions proved unequal to its capabilities. At one point, DOGE was in charge of approving a huge percentage of government grants. Ironically, however, it did not have the manpower and expertise to get such a large amount of federal spending out the door efficiently, which is why they no longer have that responsibility.

But DOGE is still very much in operation. You can go to DOGE.gov and see that the agency claims to have saved $215 billion, or $1,335.40 per taxpayer, along with another $30 billion in savings from regulatory changes that eliminated 1.9 million words from regulations and guidance documents. The agency’s X account is still cranking out fresh updates. Just in February alone, DOGE took credit for canceling as much as $5 billion worth of contracts.

To figure out where the Trump Administration’s modernization and efficiency efforts stand, I caught up with Sam Corcos, a former DOGE employee who is currently serving as the Chief Information Officer at the Treasury Department.

“We’re Actually Able to Do More”

“There was some news story making the rounds to the effect of ‘DOGE is finally over,’ and we were all talking to each other—‘Did I miss something? Did something happen?’ Because there was no event recently that would have caused any change,” notes Corcos. “I think we’re actually able to do more now than we were before, but it’s just not as in your face.”

The sandy-blond, good-humored Corcos, who has temporarily waylaid a successful career as a tech executive for public service, is quick to emphasize that the problems DOGE was designed to address are very real and ongoing. “I have personal line of sight on something like $500 billion in provable fraud and improper payments,” he says. “About half of that is recurring, and about half of that is COVID-era fraud, and that’s just within my purview.”

Despite his tech background, Corcos is quick to note that the problems he’s dealing with often don’t require serious expertise. “I’ve been asked questions about identifying fraud such as, ‘Oh man, did you use some sophisticated AI or machine learning tool?’” Corcos says. “The answer is, no, we just compared two numbers to each other, and one of them was 1,000 times bigger than the other. So it’s probably fraud.”

His frustration is that so much of what needs fixing is simply a matter of accountability and common sense. “Here’s the innovative approach I would recommend: if somebody is entitled to something based on some status or some income, we should check that before we give them that money,” Corcos says. “That alone is at least a few hundred billion dollars per year.”

The problem is that until now no one has been checking. What stands out to Corcos is how obvious so much of the fraud is. “We’re looking for SNAP fraud, and there are a quarter million active places that take EBT cards. Sometimes you can just tell by looking if it’s fraud. If it’s a 7-Eleven, it’s probably not fraud. If it’s a Whole Foods, it’s probably not fraud. And at that point it’s, okay, what is this place? It’s literally a strip club,” says Corcos. “I can send you the picture. I just went to Google Maps, went to Street View, and looked at it, and there it is. That’s the level of diligence that we do right now—it’s nothing.”

There are, of course, bigger structural changes within the government that do require Corcos’s tech expertise. Overseeing simple modernization efforts also occupies much of his time. Such projects would be taken for granted in private industry, but inside the federal government, the most basic efforts at efficiency exist somewhere between comedy and Kafka.

For instance, Corcos was initially brought into the administration by DOGE to help finally bring the IRS’s computer system into the 21st century, a project he’s still working on. He has his work cut out for him: the IRS’s IT modernization project is currently $15 billion over budget—and it began around the time Corcos, who’s in his mid-30s, was born.

Still, this highlights one underappreciated aspect of DOGE—it is the first time the federal government has effectively harnessed the expertise of America’s innovative tech industry. Corcos, who has real-world tech expertise and managerial experience, is a radical departure from the typical federal manager.

Personnel Is Policy

Historically, federal agencies have placed no emphasis, much less prestige, on roles related to tech infrastructure and innovation—the complete opposite of how the private sector operates. “If somebody applies for a role at my next company and they say they worked as a software engineer in the federal government, my immediate instinct is not, ‘Oh yeah, this person is probably really good,’” observes Corcos.

Beyond possessing the necessary tech expertise, the key part of his job is doing what all the federal managers who came before him wouldn’t do—make changes rather than do nothing and prolong existing problems. “My biggest observation, which just constantly gets reinforced, is that the gap between policy and implementation is huge, and so much attention across all administrations historically has been on the policy side,” Corcos says. “All the smart people write memos, and then 15 years later, the thing that was in that memo still doesn’t actually exist in reality.”

Ultimately, the real problem is not that no one has tried to innovate in government; it’s that the system resists efficiency and policy implementation by design. Corcos notes that his Democrat friends in the tech industry have been supportive of what he’s doing because “we are doing the things that they have been advocating for a long time, and they’re finally getting them done.”

One tech industry friend who worked in the Obama Administration essentially told him, “I love all the stuff that you’re doing; everything that you’re doing is what we wish we could have done. I just wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish it didn’t have to be so harsh.” But the difference between what Corcos is doing now and his friend’s failed efforts to improve the tech infrastructure under Obama is that Corcos’s efforts aren’t hamstrung by an inability to upset federal workers, an influential Democratic constituency.

However, the fact Republicans don’t have any political incentives to placate federal workers doesn’t mean they aren’t a major obstacle. “I always thought that the deep state was the intelligence community and all of this stuff, but the real deep state is the career civil service staff,” Corcos says. “It is very, very hard to get things delivered. You can write a policy document, but actually getting that to work in reality, it has to go through the career staff, and they are the gatekeepers. They hold the keys, and they don’t give them up.”

Still, Corcos notes that he’s making headway, both by building trust with agency employees and, when necessary, learning how to sideline notoriously difficult-to-fire federal workers. And the financial stakes of the federal government’s absurd personnel problems are incredibly high. “If they’re a person who’s responsible for billions of dollars of technology decisions, it is cheaper for us to pay for this person to go live in Hawaii and not touch anything until they retire than it is to continue to let them make bad decisions,” Corcos says.

The Media Fervor Dies Down

One key reason DOGE and the Trump Administration’s efficiency efforts encountered so much resistance early on was because of the media’s intense and hostile scrutiny. Last June, the New York Times did something almost wholly without precedent: the paper published “The People Carrying Out Musk’s Plans at DOGE,” which did not just identify the 70-some people initially working at the agency—it included photos of every one of them, including Corcos.

Naturally, left-wing websites quickly began circulating the article for the purposes of encouraging harassment (or worse) of the agency’s leaders. The pressure was intense. “I was doxxed within about three hours of joining the government,” Corcos says. “I had reporters contacting ex-girlfriends to try to find some kind of a story on me.”

It is almost impossible to imagine a similar effort from the corporate media to highlight the failures of traditional government agencies. If a Democratic administration got elected and a conservative publication ran photos of the leadership of the Department of Education, funded to the tune of $268 billion, noting that those people are responsible for a majority of American kids not being able to read, any resulting personal harassment of those employees would certainly be decried by the same outlets that see The New York Times publishing the photos of DOGE employees as hard-hitting transparency.

Even in areas where criticisms of DOGE might have been warranted, the reporting on the agency came off less as a matter of accountability and more as a defense of the indefensible status quo in the federal government. For instance, there was a flurry of reporting on how DOGE employees may have improperly handled sensitive information such as Social Security numbers. Yet, there’s very little ongoing reporting on how millions of Social Security numbers are available for sale on the internet because of the federal government’s poor IT security, or the fact that millions of illegal immigrants are using stolen Social Security numbers to get work permits—and that the federal government encourages this massive ID theft. If the press is anti-DOGE, it’s purely for partisan and ideological reasons, not because DOGE and aligned efforts in the Trump Administration aren’t in the public interest.

Despite the media’s hostility, reality eventually overwhelmed the media’s anti-DOGE narrative. The recent revelation of hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid fraud in Minnesota, which could add up to billions when including Medicaid fraud in many other states, has made the argument against DOGE’s mission a losing one.

“I think the media fervor over DOGE has decreased more than the effectiveness of what it is that we’re doing has decreased,” Corcos says. But there remains a lack of manpower and leadership relative to the size of the problems. “We don’t lack for money, say, at the IRS or Treasury—we have way too much money, frankly,” says Corcos. “What we do lack is people who are willing to make good decisions, or able to make good decisions.”

Still, good decisions are being made. Earlier last month, in an effort to help crowdsource identifying Medicaid fraud, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) publicly released data covering “$1.1 trillion in Medicaid claims—slightly more than one-fifth of total Medicaid spending from 2018 through 2024.” Unsurprisingly, many online sleuths are already turning up numerous examples of apparent fraud. Even legacy media institutions are taking advantage of the data. A recent Wall Street Journal report highlights how autism treatment has emerged as a hotbed for fraud, noting that one small Indiana firm billed the government $29 million for just 84 patients.

Corcos is quick to highlight the release of the HHS data, crediting its new chief technology officer, Zach Terrell, for his role in making it happen. Like Corcos, Terrell also started at DOGE before taking on a role at a more established cabinet agency.

“There’s more momentum now. It’s just not as visible,” he says. “It took us a while to figure out how to do things like that.” Corcos notes that the business and technology backgrounds of DOGE hires could take them only so far. They eventually had to hunker down and figure out the political and bureaucratic sides of their jobs—how to interpret statutes, work with legislative affairs, forge working relationships with career staff, and so on. But they’re doing it. The result is that “things that would normally take years are getting done in days to weeks,” Corcos says.

Even if the efforts to date to root out fraud and increase efficiency within the federal Leviathan seem underwhelming relative to the size of the problem, they still represent a radical improvement that American taxpayers should be grateful for.

“It is extremely clear to me that if Trump had not won this election, nobody was ever going to check these things. All the COVID-era fraud, all of the fraud, would have just been brushed under the rug. Nobody was going to look for this stuff,” Corcos says. “Now it actually feels like we are closer to solving these problems than we’ve ever been.”