Big Balls Was Just the Beginning

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, leading periodically to claims—most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management—that the group doesn’t exist, or has vanished altogether.

But DOGE isn’t dead. Many of its original members are in full-time roles at various government agencies, and the new National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, a close ally of Musk’s.

Even if DOGE doesn’t survive another year, or until the US semiquincentennial—its original expiration date, per the executive order establishing it—the organization’s larger project will continue. DOGE from its inception was used for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the wholesale consolidation of data in service of concentrating power in the executive branch. It is a pattern that experts say could spill over beyond the Trump administration.

“I do think it has altered the norms about where legislative power ends and where executive power begins simply by ignoring those norms,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “This is not necessarily going to be limited to Republican administrations. There are going to be future Democratic presidents who will say, ‘Well, DOGE was able to do this, why can’t we?’”

The earliest days of DOGE were characterized by a chaotic blitz in which small teams of DOGE operatives, like the now infamous Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, were deployed across government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing workers, and cutting contracts. And while these moves were often radical, if not appearing to be illegal, as matters of bureaucratic operation, they were in service of what had been the Trump administration’s agenda all along.

Goals like cutting discretionary spending and drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce had already been championed by people like vice president JD Vance, who in 2021 called for the “de-Ba’athification” of the government, and Russell Vought, now the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These goals were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought wasn’t the end, but the means—its unique insight was that controlling technical infrastructure, something achievable with a small group, functionally amounted to controlling the government.

“There has never been a unit of government that was handed so much power to fundamentally upend government agencies with so little oversight,” says Moynihan.

Under the Constitution, the authority for establishing and funding federal agencies comes from Congress. But Trump and many of the people who support him, including Vought and Vance, adhere to what was until relatively recently a fringe view of how government should be run: the unitary executive theory. This posits that, much like the CEO of a company, the president has near complete control over the executive branch, of which federal agencies are a part—power more like that of a king than of the figure described in the nation’s founding documents.