DOGE cancellation theatrics change nothing in the regulatory power game
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“Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists.”
That admission came 10 paragraphs into a widely reported “exclusive” Reuters story claiming DOGE “doesn’t exist.”
We now face the supposed end of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Reuters reported that the brand and advisory body will wind down early. This was then repeated by outlets like USA Today.
The administration claims reports of DOGE’s death are a tad premature. An X post by Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor lightly rebuked Reuters: “Good editing by @reuters – spliced my full comments across paragraphs 2/3 to create a grabbing headline.” Kupor went on to reiterate that “de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse” along with enhancing efficiency are being institutionalized by OPM and OMB.
DOGE’s design was always decentralized. That’s not a new revelation from Reuters. Rather than concentrating power in a single office, its “Team Leads” were embedded across multiple agencies. Former leader Elon Musk’s own role legally maxed out at 130 days. Deeper looks under the hood showed the White House, particularly the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in the driver’s seat all along.
The DOGE “savings” website is still live (claiming $214 billion overall and $1,329 per taxpayer savings) as is its regulatory streamlining landing page, complete with the “Unconstitutionality Index.” Contract terminations were still being posted on the DOGE X account as of yesterday.
DOGE was seemingly overhyped, but important at the same time. Set up by Executive Order 14158, DOGE was essentially a renaming of the United States Digital Service. Its stated “purpose” was to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Sounds like an IT project.
And DOGE’s sunset was baked in from day one. As CEI has noted early on, DOGE was always an 18-month, special-government-employee experiment scheduled to dissolve during the July 4, 2026 America 250 celebrations.
Interestingly, the bulk of the Trump spending and deregulatory program was never run primarily through DOGE at all. Of the president’s 213 executive orders issued so far, only a handful (eight by my count) of early ones actually tasked DOGE or even mentioned it.
Trump’s signature deregulatory initiatives — the 10-for-one regulatory rollback, sunsetting of rules, curbing overcriminalization, terminating non-statutory programs, zero-based regulatory budgeting in energy, recissions of Biden whole-of-government directives — are coordinated largely through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management (OMB) and agency heads, not DOGE.
In that sense, DOGE was always the sizzle, not the steak. Symbolism, a technology-driven audit function, maybe a dash of political cover. But DOGE was always constitutionally incapable of functioning as the central engine of federal reductions in force, contract reviews, procurement transparency or the targeting of programs lacking statutory authority.
Even after the DOGE branding exercise has come and gone, it remains the job of job of the president to implement the deregulatory tools he continues to wield under Article II, and for Congress to go even further in actual takedowns of agencies, their enabling statutes and the downstream spending and regulation these enable.
Treating a planned expiration as a collapse is at least partly political theater. Few of those fixated on DOGE’s “end” seem motivated by concern over the mission of streamlining government. Rather, many appear exuberant at the prospect of its failure and seem to be rooting for a powerful, centralized government.
Many critics of DOGE and its purported “power” embraced sweeping Biden-era unilateralism, from whole-of-government climate rules to student-loan cancellation and pandemic mandates. They rediscovered separation of powers only when the pendulum swung the other way. DOGE’s access to agency data or its push to identify constitutionally suspect rules was has always been modest compared to those incursions.
Of course, as I’ve often noted in regulatory commentary, Trump himself has never reliably resisted the temptations of the administrative state. His price control flirtations and federal steering of industries up to and including partial nationalizations represent swamp muck that make deconstruction of the administrative state impossible.
Still, properly executed, DOGE can ignite again with the 2026 Fourth of July fireworks and dazzle us with a comprehensive report to the president and Congress. Perhaps we should even expect such a finale. The only source of DOGE’s demise so far is the Reuters interpretation of Kupor’s remarks. So far the decentralized project remains intact and it would not be a problem to reconvene it for a final set of recommendations.
Whether DOGE is completely dismantled now (it is not) or is seven months from now is immaterial. The reality remains: DOGE never could deconstruct the administrative/spending state on its own. What is material is whether Congress will assert itself on the side of limited rather than unlimited government.
Will recission votes like those Elon Musk urged ever move beyond a few paltry billion dollars? Will lawmakers finally confront the statutory agencies and commissions that actually drive federal growth and gut them, restoring power to states and individuals?
This is the real work. In the grand scheme of things, none of the battle for limited government has ever been anchored at the US Digital Service. DOGE’s work continues in decentralized fashion as it always has, and can continue to function as a catalyst for change.
For more, see:
“Many Trump Spending And Deregulatory Executive Orders Bypass DOGE,” Forbes