Business
Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs
An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.
As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.
After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.
This story is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.
But parts of the operation are becoming clear: Many of the executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Mr. Musk has said they will not be paid — a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives — and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks. Some, including possibly Mr. Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.
The representatives will largely be stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials, DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy.
“The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naïve billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation,” said Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration with associates who have considered joining DOGE.
“The friends I know have huge lives,” Mr. Traina said, “and they’re agreeing to work for free for six months, and leave their families and roll up their sleeves in an attempt to really turn things around. You can view it either way.”
DOGE leaders have told others that the minority of people not detailed to agencies would be housed within the Executive Office of the President at the U.S. Digital Service, which was created in 2014 by former President Barack Obama to “change our government’s approach to technology.”
DOGE is also expected to have an office in the Office of Management and Budget, and officials have also considered forming a think tank outside the government in the future.
Mr. Musk’s friends have been intimately involved in choosing people who are set to be deployed to various agencies. Those who have conducted interviews for DOGE include the Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Shaun Maguire, Baris Akis and others who have a personal connection to Mr. Musk. Some who have received the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious grant funded by Mr. Thiel given to those who promise to skip or drop out of college to become entrepreneurs, are involved with programming and operations for DOGE. Brokering an introduction to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy, or their inner circles, has been a key way for leaders to be picked for deployment.
That is how the co-founder of Loom, Vinay Hiremath, said he became involved in DOGE in a rare public statement from someone who worked with the entity. In a post this month on his personal blog, Mr. Hiremath described the work that DOGE employees have been doing before he decided against moving to Washington to join the entity.
“After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work,” he wrote. “The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.”
These recruits are assigned to specific agencies where they are thought to have expertise. Some other DOGE enrollees have come to the attention of Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy through X. In recent weeks, DOGE’s account on X has posted requests to recruit a “very small number” of full-time salaried positions for engineers and back-office functions like human resources.
The DOGE team, including those paid engineers, is largely working out of a glass building in SpaceX’s downtown office located a few blocks from the White House. Some people close to Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk hope that these DOGE engineers can use artificial intelligence to find cost-cutting opportunities.
The broader effort is being run by two people with starkly different backgrounds: One is Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and former top health official in Mr. Trump’s first White House who is close with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. Mr. Smith has effectively been running DOGE during the transition period, with a particular focus on recruiting, especially for the workers who will be embedded at the agencies.
Mr. Smith has been working closely with Steve Davis, a collaborator of Mr. Musk’s for two decades who is widely seen as working as Mr. Musk’s proxy on all things. Mr. Davis has joined Mr. Musk as he calls experts with questions about the federal budget, for instance.
Other people involved include Matt Luby, Mr. Ramaswamy’s chief of staff and childhood friend; Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign official; and Rachel Riley, a McKinsey partner who works closely with Mr. Smith.
Mr. Musk’s personal counsel — Chris Gober — and Mr. Ramaswamy’s personal lawyer — Steve Roberts — have been exploring various legal issues regarding the structure of DOGE. James Burnham, a former Justice Department official, is also helping DOGE with legal matters. Bill McGinley, Mr. Trump’s initial pick for White House counsel who was instead named as legal counsel for DOGE, has played a more minimal role.
“DOGE will be a cornerstone of the new administration, helping President Trump deliver his vision of a new golden era,” said James Fishback, the founder of Azoria, an investment firm, and confidant of Mr. Ramaswamy who will be providing outside advice for DOGE.
Despite all this firepower, many budget experts have been deeply skeptical about the effort and its cost-cutting ambitions. Mr. Musk initially said the effort could result in “at least $2 trillion” in cuts from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. But budget experts say that goal would be difficult to achieve without slashing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Mr. Trump has promised not to cut.
Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have also recast what success might mean. Mr. Ramaswamy emphasized DOGE-led deregulation on X last month, saying that removing regulations could stimulate the economy and that “the success of DOGE can’t be measured through deficit reduction alone.”
And in an interview last week with Mark Penn, the chairman and chief executive of Stagwell, a marketing company, Mr. Musk downplayed the total potential savings.
“We’ll try for $2 trillion — I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Mr. Musk said. “You kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for two trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said it’s slashing roughly 14% of its workforce, or about 700 workers, partly because artificial intelligence is reshaping the way people work.
“The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native,” Coinbase Chief Executive and co-founder Brian Armstrong said in a Tuesday email to employees.
The email, which was posted on social media, said engineers with the help of AI are completing work in days rather than weeks. As more tasks get automated, that’s made it possible for the company to lean on smaller teams.
The company also cited other factors contributing to the job losses, including the volatility of the cryptocurrency business.
Founded in San Francisco, Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. Millions of people use its platform to buy, sell, transfer and store cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.
Coinbase is among tech companies that have been laying off workers and pointing to how AI is making workers more productive. Although some experts say the role AI has been playing is overblown, advancements in technology have also made it possible to generate code and automate other tasks. Companies are also spending more on artificial intelligence, some building new AI-powered gadgets or building out new data centers.
This year, companies such as Block, Meta, Oracle and more have announced they’re slashing thousands of workers. From January to March, tech companies have announced 52,050 layoffs, up 40% from the same period last year, according to outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Coinbase is also changing how it operates, Armstrong told employees. It’s reducing management layers and some leaders will oversee 15 workers or more, his email said. Managers will operate like “player-coaches” and it’s experimenting with “one person teams” in which the role of an engineer, designer and product manager are part of one position.
“AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era,” Armstrong told employees. “This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”
Coinbase largely makes money from cryptocurrency transaction fees, but trading activity has slowed. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company reported total revenue of roughly $1.8 billion, missing analysts’ expectations. The company posted a net loss of $667 million during that quarter, which it partly attributed to losses in certain strategic investments.
As of December, Coinbase had more than 4,900 employees, according to its website. Although the company leased office space in San Francisco, it has allowed employees to work remotely and doesn’t have a physical headquarters.
Coinbase’s share price fell more than 2% on Tuesday to $197.75.
The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services rose to $60.3 billion in March, increasing 4.4 percent from the previous month, after the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s global tariffs, according to data from the Commerce Department released on Tuesday.
Exports grew 2 percent in the month, to a record $320.9 billion, as the United States exported more oil, soybeans and industrial supplies. The U.S. trade surplus in petroleum hit a record in March, as war with Iran pushed up the price of oil and U.S. energy exports. Imports also gained 2.3 percent in March, to $381.2 billion. The combination increased the monthly trade deficit, the gap between what the United States imports and what it exports.
Tariffs resulted in up-and-down swings in the trade deficit last year. The monthly trade deficit is now somewhat lower than it was in 2024. But overall, the figure hit a record last year, as the United States continued to import high-priced computer chips and weight-loss drugs, and importers stockpiled foreign goods before tariffs took effect.
The data provided the first snapshot of trade since the Supreme Court ruling forced major changes to the Trump administration’s tariff regime.
On Feb. 20, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump had exceeded his authority last year when he used an emergency law to impose steep tariffs on nearly every nation.
That ruling forced the administration to withdraw the double-digit tariffs it had issued under that law, which varied by country based on bilateral trade deficits. Mr. Trump immediately moved to replace those levies with a flat 10 percent tariff, issued under a legal authority known as Section 122.
The Section 122 tariff will expire in July unless Congress votes to reauthorize it. So the Trump administration has been working on tariffs to replace it. It has started two trade investigations under another legal provision known as Section 301, which allows the president to impose tariffs in response to unfair trade practices.
One of the new investigations would target countries that don’t have laws blocking imports made with forced labor. The other centers on what the administration calls “excess capacity” among 16 of the country’s largest trading partners.
The Trump administration says overproduction in the factory sectors of some foreign countries has resulted in large and persistent U.S. trade deficits with those nations. Representatives from various industries, ranging from sugar to technology to chemicals, are set to testify about the investigation on Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington this week.
Next week, Mr. Trump is expected to visit Beijing, for a meeting with the Chinese leader that will be partly focused on trade. U.S. imports from China have shrunk significantly, as the administration has imposed high tariffs on Chinese goods, and companies have relocated supply chains out of the country.
How bad are sales of Tesla’s Cybertruck? Nearly 20% of the vehicles went to Elon Musk’s other companies, raising questions about the vehicle’s future
The Cybertruck, Tesla’s would-be competitor in the EV pickup truck market, has long since secured its place as the Edsel of the electric vehicle age.
It’s been derided as unwieldy and ugly and unable to match other pickups in basic functionality. In the colorful take of Tesla critic Will Lockett, it’s “the vehicular form of halitosis” and an “ick’ on four wheels.”
But one doesn’t need words to describe how the Cybertruck has fared among the pickup-buying public; the numbers tell the story.
According to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sold only 20,237 of the vehicles in 2025, down 48.1% from the 38,965 sold the year before. The slide continued in the first quarter of this year, Cox reported — 3,519 sold, down 45.1% from the 6,406 sold in the year-earlier period.
But there’s more to the story — or to be more precise, less.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, of the 7,071 Cybertruck U.S. registrations, 1,279 went to SpaceX, the rocketship company headed by Tesla boss Elon Musk, which is planning an initial public stock offering sometime this year. An additional 60 were registered by other companies in the Musk empire, namely xAI, Neuralink and the Boring Co.
In other words, nearly 20% of all the Cybertrucks registered in the U.S. in the fourth quarter went to Musk’s companies. Based on the Cybertruck’s starting price of $70,000, that’s the equivalent of $93.7 million in merchandise circulating within Musk’s orbit rather than going to outside buyers.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, of the 7,071 Cybertruck U.S. registrations, 1,279 went to SpaceX
The figures were compiled by S&P Global Mobility and reported by Bloomberg. I asked Tesla to comment but received no reply.
The transfers of Cybertrucks to other Musk companies raise questions about how he conflates the interests of his private companies and his public company (Tesla), arguably to the disadvantage of Tesla shareholders. More on that in a moment.
The sales numbers raise obvious questions about the future of the Cybertruck as part of Tesla’s five-model lineup. They also undermine Musk’s declared faith in the truck. When it was introduced in 2023, Musk asserted that he expected to sell 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertrucks a year once manufacturing capacity was fully engaged.
It would be hard to find market experts who took that prediction seriously, but few probably expected the shortfall to be so steep. Cybertruck’s 48.1% decline in 2025 sales compared with 2024 was the sharpest such decline of any EV in the U.S. market over that period, in which EV sales generally slumped.
Initial Cybertruck sales of 38,965 in 2024 seemed almost to validate Musk’s optimism. But negative perceptions took hold through the year and into 2025, starting with the ridicule the vehicle’s boxy design attracted on the street.
Poor manufacturing quality has prompted U.S. regulators to order eight recalls of Cybertrucks since its introduction, culminating in the March 2025 recall of almost every Cybertruck to correct the tendency of a stainless steel exterior panel to come off the vehicle at freeway speeds, posing a hazard to other drivers.
Online reports and videos showing Cybertrucks defeated by conditions such as uneven terrain and steep grades that are routinely managed by rival pickups may also have sapped buyer enthusiasm for the model.
It’s true that the Cybertruck has problems that aren’t shared with other EVs. One is that it can’t be sold in European Union countries, because the EU has found that its exterior design can imperil pedestrians.
Nor do other EV manufacturers have to contend with public obloquy being showered on their leaders; Tesla sales in Germany cratered last year after Musk threw his support behind the extreme-right neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany. There, new Tesla vehicle registrations fell by 76.3% in February 2025 from the same month a year earlier — that is, to 1,429 from 6,029. The decline continued all year, resulting in an overall decline of 48.4%.
As my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen reported last year, public distemper over Musk’s position as the leader of DOGE, the quasi-governmental body that ran roughshod through the federal workforce after Donald Trump launched his second term, also may have cut into Tesla sales in the U.S. A study by Yale researchers last year estimated that Musk cost Tesla as many as 1.26 million car sales since October 2022, when he acquired the social media platform Twitter and gave greater access on it to the far right and other extremist voices.
That said, Teslas remained the best-selling EVs in the U.S. market last year with nearly 60% of EV unit sales, according to Cox. Its full-year decline of 7% was exceeded by several other carmakers with EVs in their lineups, including BMW (down 16.7%), Kia (down 39.7%) and Ford (down 14.1%).
The U.S. EV market generally lost ground after the expiration of federal incentives last year, but many individual models slumped sharply, including Ford’s all-electric version of its top-selling F-150 pickup, sales of which fell 18.5% from the year before (though it still outsold the Cybertruck).
Tesla’s transfers of Cybertrucks to other Musk operations should concern Tesla shareholders, depending on how much, if anything, SpaceX and the other companies paid for the vehicles. In arm’s-length transactions between related parties, the transfers should be marked at prices resembling those on the open market, whether individual or fleet sales.
Tesla has been vague to the point of opacity about these deals. In an amendment to its annual report filed on April 30 (after the Bloomberg report), it disclosed that it received about $143.3 million last year and $100,000 this year in deals with SpaceX, including “the sale of vehicles” at what may be market prices. But it didn’t say those deals involved the Cybertruck.
It would be interesting to know how SpaceX is using its Cybertrucks, since it wouldn’t seem to need a fleet to transport equipment headed for space in the back of pickup trucks. Why Musk’s AI or neurological companies need any such vehicles is hard to gauge.
As it happens, however, Tesla investors don’t seem to have been fazed by Bloomberg’s report. Tesla shares closed in Monday’s trading at $392.51, higher than they were on April 15, the day before Bloomberg published, when they closed at $391.95.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Musk has melded his personal interests with those of his public shareholders. The prototypical such action occurred in 2016, when he orchestrated Tesla’s purchase of his SolarCity for $2.8 billion, a 35% premium from the latter’s trading price. (Investment manager Jim Chanos, who had short positions in both companies, called the deal a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst.”)
At the time, Tesla’s seven board seats were held by Musk and four of his cronies, including his brother Kimbal, and SolarCity’s board included Musk and two of his cousins. On that occasion, Tesla investors turned queasy, pushing Tesla shares down by more than 10% the day the deal was announced.
Musk defended the deal as a triumph of clean energy industry synergy, but one struggles to find significant gains from the linkup. Energy generation and storage, which would cover SolarCity’s business, accounted for about 13.5% of Tesla’s revenue in 2025, nearly a decade after the merger.
What role the Cybertruck — indeed, any Tesla vehicles — will play in the company’s future remains murky. Musk recently has talked about shifting the company’s focus to AI, robotaxis and humanoid robots, but these all resemble pipe dreams. AI is more and more a marketing term with less meat on its bones than the incessant publicity about it suggests and Tesla’s robotaxi venture today consists of about a dozen vehicles tooling around Austin, Texas, with human supervisors in the car or near at hand.
Musk last year projected that humanoid robots would generate “$30 trillion in revenue” for Tesla, though he acknowledged that he was “just guessing” and that there would be a “long way to go between here and making one billion robots a year.” As I’ve reported, however, even some robotics experts argue that giving workaday robots humanoid features makes no sense functionally and is likely to be abandoned once manufacturers seriously contemplate how household robots should look and function.
None of this means that Tesla might not be able to recapture its mojo in the EV market. Consumer interest in EVs tends to rise and fall in lockstep with gas prices. EV makers had a tough 2025 in the U.S. But that could turn around this year if President Trump’s Iran adventure continues to drive up the cost of oil and consequently gasoline prices at the pump.
But Tesla faces a lot more competition for EVs than it ever has in the past; other companies such as Hyundai have moved down-market and China’s BYD recently surpassed Tesla in global sales of battery-powered vehicles. BYD has been largely kept out of the U.S. market by high tariffs, but it may be impossible to keep its cars out forever. Tesla, which pioneered the EV market, may need a new model to compete with BYD and the foreign and domestic automakers already in the market, but the Cybertruck sure hasn’t been looking like its savior.
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