According to a report from The Washington Post, DOGE is using an AI tool to analyze federal regulations and determine which to get rid of. A DOGE PowerPoint presentation obtained by the publication notes that its “AI Solution” — reportedly called the DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool — found that 100,000 out of over 200,000 regulations “can be deleted.” The document sets a September 1 goal deadline for agencies to complete their own deregulation lists using the tool, which it says can be done in under four weeks, and then “DOGE will roll-up a delete list of 50% of all Federal Regulations (100k Regulatory Rules).”
The tool is targeting regulations that are no longer required by law, The Washington Post reports. After it makes its suggestions, staffers would review the proposed deletions before finalizing a plan. According to the PowerPoint, the tool has already been tried out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), where it’s been used to write “100% of deregulations,” and by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections. The Washington Post spoke to three HUD employees who confirmed it was recently used. One also said that the tool got things wrong on several occasions, misreading the language of the law at times.
DOGE will reportedly start training other agencies on the tool this month. Head over to The Washington Post to read the full report.
Elon Musk’s interview with CBS Sunday Morning seemed to get off to an awkward start, as reporter David Pogue asked the SpaceX CEO about his thoughts on his ally Donald Trump’s policies, including growing restrictions on international students.
“I think we want to stick to the subject of the day, which is, like, spaceships, as opposed to, you know, presidential policy,” Musk said.
Pogue looked surprised, replying, “Oh, okay, I was told, ‘Anything’s good.’”
“No,” Musk said, while looking into the distance. “Well … no.”
He did, however, comment on the controversy around his Department of Government Efficiency, which has been making aggressive cuts across federal agencies, and which Musk complained had become “the whipping boy for everything.”
“If there was some cut, real or imagined, everyone would blame DOGE,” he said.
Musk also suggested that he’s “a little stuck in a bind” when it comes to the Trump administration, where “I don’t want to speak out against the administration, but I also don’t want to take responsibility for everything the administration’s doing.”
Pogue’s interview was conducted before SpaceX’s Starship test flight on Tuesday, which saw the ship successfully launch but lose control on reentry. Asked whether there’s anything linking his various companies — in addition to SpaceX, there’s Tesla (which faces ongoing anti-Musk protests), xAI and X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, and The Boring Company — Musk replied, “I guess you could think of the businesses as things that improve the probable trajectory of civilization.”
At the time, Musk was supposedly pulling back from his government work but said he would remain involved for a “day or two” per week. He told Pogue, “DOGE is going to continue, just as a way of life. And I will have some participation in that, but as I’ve said publicly, my focus has to be on the companies at this point.”
Since the first days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been everywhere in the federal government, moving fast and breaking things. In a matter of weeks, DOGE operatives have spread across dozens of government agencies as they have attempted to terminate tens of thousands of federal employees. With so much focus on where DOGE is going, WIRED wanted to take a beat to look at where they’ve come from and what that might tell us about how they’re thinking about reshaping the federal government.
The big takeaway: Many on the DOGE team are from Musk’s world. If Musk is America’s CEO, then DOGE has become his Silicon Valley executive branch.
We’ve mapped out a non-exhaustive list of people affiliated with DOGE, including creating a searchable table with each member, their corporate history, and the agencies they’ve been connected to. Readers can check that out, and click through it, below. We plan to keep updating this as we find more DOGE operatives or as known affiliates move to new agencies.
We’re focused on the new people brought in under the second Trump administration or directly hired into agencies—as Special Government Employees (SGEs) or regular employees—who are operating as members of DOGE teams. This gets a little tricky because there are technically two DOGEs established under the president’s executive order. There’s the US DOGE Service (USDS), formerly the US Digital Service, that’s a permanent organization. Then there’s the temporary USDS organization, which wraps up on July 4, 2026, and through which SGEs can be hired.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
The DOGE world, as it stands, seems to break down into roughly three categories: former Trump officials, conservative lawyers, and imports from the Silicon Valley area (funders, founders, technologists, or people connected to them). In that first category we find people like DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. The two of them have been Musk’s guides to DC.
In that second category are people like James Burnham and Austin Raynor, both former clerks for conservative Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, respectively. Jacob Altik, another conservative lawyer on the DOGE squad, has been selected to clerk for Gorsuch. Jeremy Lewin, who was part of DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worked with Second Lady Usha Vance’s former law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that has also represented Tesla.
Then, the biggest throughline of all: Of those Silicon Valley imports, one of the most clear themes across DOGE’s ranks is fairly obvious: a connection to Elon Musk. Forty-nine people on our list have connections to Musk, his companies, or his greater network. This connection is most often through one of his allies or one of his companies. There are the obvious people like Steve Davis, president of Musk’s Boring Company, who have followed Musk across his various ventures. (Davis previously worked at SpaceX and assisted Musk in his overhaul of X, formerly Twitter.) Davis spearheaded the DOGE recruitment efforts before inauguration day and has continued to play a pivotal role in the organization. Similarly, SpaceX employee Brian Bjelde, who is now at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), also helped Musk downsize Twitter’s staff in 2022.
There are people like many of the young engineers WIRED first identified who were given the keys to different government agencies, like Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, and Edward Coristine, who were all interns or employees at one of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, and Neuralink. (Musk has been involved in others, but these are the ones he controls.)
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban waded into the latest government tech shake-up on Saturday, posting an unexpected offer of support for newly laid-off federal workers on the social network Bluesky.
His message, which quickly gained traction, urged the displaced engineers and designers to turn the upheaval to their advantage.
“If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company,” wrote Cuban. “It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms. I’m happy to invest and/or help.”
Cuban’s offer came after the government’s General Services Administration (GSA) abruptly gutted its 18F technology unit, which helps other government agencies build, buy, and share tech products. Per Politico, the layoffs affected roughly 70 individuals who learned the news around 1 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday. Among other things, the unit had reportedly built Login.gov, a secure and private way for the public to access services at government agencies, including Social Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The early-morning layoffs tie to a Trump administration directive to shrink the federal workforce and slash spending at the behest of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The cuts weren’t a first for 18F; according to Politico, two dozen more 18F employees were laid off in February when GSA cut probationary staffers.
Those impacted in the wee hours of Saturday morning also received emails late Friday from DOGE with the subject line, “What did you do last week? Part II.”
According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.
In the wake of these new layoffs, Cuban’s proposal presents an intriguing possibility: could the very workers pushed out of government help reshape the future of civic tech on their own terms? As DOGE moves to dismantle agencies, even Musk has acknowledged fallout tied to the speed with which his team is moving. On Wednesday, Musk shared that, “For example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled — very briefly — was Ebola prevention.” (Public health experts have since said the government’s support has not been fully restored.)
The question now is whether some percentage of the government’s growing number of displaced former employees will seize the moment, banding together to build the startups that could one day sell their expertise back to the government. If so, it would represent a striking twist in the administration’s efforts to shrink the public workforce.
If Cuban has his way, at least one such unit may find itself inside a private company the government has no choice but to rely on. Another Bluesky user even had a branding idea for the startup, telling Cuban, “Name the new company 18FU.”
Before Trump was inaugurated, the USDS administrator was Mina Hsiang. After she left, Ted Carstensen was the highest-ranking legacy USDS leader, but he resigned from the organization on February 6.
“After Ted resigned, we received no correspondence as far as who the head of this organization was,” says a current USDS employee, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.
Some people WIRED spoke with at USDS view Amy Gleason, a former USDS official who served in the first Trump administration, as a liaison between legacy USDS, DOGE, and other agencies, but little is known about her official role. Steve Davis, a longtime Musk associate and the president of the Boring Company, is another name rumored to be formally leading DOGE. Davis has worked with Musk for years, and led the billionaire’s cost-cutting efforts when taking over Twitter, now X, in 2022. Davis went as far as sleeping in the Twitter HQ with his wife, Nicole Hollander, and their child. (Hollander is now a high-level General Services Administration official.)
“Steve Davis has always been articulated as the leader of DOGE, but when I ask if he’s the administrator, [managers] say we don’t know,” one former USDS employee tells WIRED. “When I ask if he’s the interim administrator, they say ‘we don’t know.’ They’ve said Brad Smith [a health care entrepreneur with ties to Davis] is serving in a chief of staff role.”
Meanwhile, as USDS staffers are trying to figure out who is running their agency, dozens of them have been laid off. Around 50 people out of USDS’s approximately 200 employees were fired on Friday. Sources tell WIRED that product managers, designers, and members of the talent team were hit the hardest, along with some engineers.
“No rhyme or reason. Literally in the middle of work,” another source said of the Friday night firings. “There are so many of us.”
“I have heard that our directors at USDS (legacy) still have not received any kind of list or justification for the intention to terminate emails sent Friday evening,” says another source at the agency.
Last week, multiple agencies were rocked by sudden layoffs. Dozens of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees were fired after receiving emails botching their names and roles. Later in the week, the entire CFPB team tasked with investigating big tech were terminated, a former CFPB official told WIRED. After the CFPB firings, other agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, terminated thousands of workers.
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While Musk’s DOGE workers have taken over at USDS for the last month, very few legacy employees have interacted with their new colleagues whatsoever. Earlier this month, WIRED reported that DOGE had built a “firewall” separating Musk’s team from the rest of the organization’s workforce. The only time legacy staff had a meeting with a representative from DOGE was on February 1 with Stephanie Holmes, who identified herself as the team’s new HR person.
The only other experiences legacy USDS staff have had with DOGE staff were their surprise one-on-one interviews with DOGE-affiliated engineers who refused to identify themselves during the first week of the Trump administration.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with multiple federal employee unions, have filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team to block their access to sensitive and identifying information on millions of Americans. Specifically, the plaintiffs are looking to block them from being able to access data stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and to delete any information they’ve collected so far. The lawsuit also names OPM and Acting Director Charles Ezell as defendants.
In early February, Reuters reported that Musk’s aides locked OPM employees out of the agency’s systems. “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of its sources said back then. The OPM has the largest collection of employee data in the US and contains sensitive information on both past and current federal employees, as well as on job applicants for federal positions who applied through USAJobs.gov. As the EFF notes, the agency’s records contain federal employees’ names, birthdates, home addresses, social security numbers, work experience, union activities, salaries, performance reviews, demotions, life insurance, death benefits as well as classified information NDAs. The list even includes the first names and last name initials of CIA employees in highly sensitive roles.
In its announcement, the EFF explained that the mishandling of information in OPM’s systems could lead to “significant and varied abuses,” and that DOGE’s “unchecked access” on its own puts federal employees at risk of privacy violations and even political pressure and blackmail. The foundation also emphasized the risk federal employees are facing with DOGE’s access to unrestricted information and Musk’s ownership of X. It cited Musk’s old tweets naming specific government personnels whose jobs he would cut even before he had access to OPM’s database.
OPM violated the Privacy Act of 1974 when it gave DOGE “unrestricted, wholesale access” to its systems, the EFF said. Under the Privacy Act, the written consent of the individual whose data is being shared is required if government records are to be disclosed. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs are accusing Musk and his DOGE agents of exceeding “the scope of their legal authority” by controlling OPM’s systems, because it has resulted in the the unlawful disclosure of the their contents. “Our case is fairly simple: OPM’s data is extraordinarily sensitive, OPM gave it to DOGE, and this violates the Privacy Act,” the EFF wrote. “We are asking the court to block any further data sharing and to demand that DOGE immediately destroy any and all copies of downloaded material.” Last week, a federal judge blocked Musk and DOGE from accessing Treasury Department information and ordered them to destroy any data they’ve already collected.
