President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday expanding the powers of Elon Musk’s federal spending task force, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The order announces a “transformation” that will compel agencies to build a centralized system recording every one of their contract, grant, and loan payments, where they will be required to provide a justification for each.
It also asks agency heads to work with a member of Musk’s DOGE team dispatched to their organization to review spending on contracts and grants and “terminate or modify” them “where appropriate.”
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Lastly, the order commands federal agencies to identify government-owned property that can be sold off or disposed.
The order says that a DOGE team lead embedded with every agency will file monthly reports on the organization’s contracts, including spending on travel.
Border and immigration agencies, law enforcement, the armed forces, immigration agencies and national security spending are exempt from the order.
Musk’s DOGE, which is leading the administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, was handed the expanded powers as the White House told agencies to brace for mass layoffs.
On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agency leaders instructing them to develop plans for “large-scale reductions” by mid-March.
“The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government,” the memo reads.
Trump bashed the bureaucracy, during his second administration’s first cabinet meeting earlier in the day: “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.”
At Musk’s behest, the OPM sent out emails to federal workers asking them to detail what they had done in the last week.
Musk suggested, in social media posts, that any employees who didn’t reply would lose their jobs.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that one million people had responded to OPM’s request, suggesting less than half of the 2.4 million federal workers bothered to comply.
The first round of DOGE-led purges didn’t go smoothly—even Musk admitted at the cabinet meeting Wednesday that his team had “accidentally” canceled an Ebola prevention program.
He claimed that program has been “restored” but current and former officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development told the Washington Post that’s not true.
DOGE also fired staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee America’s nuclear stockpile, leading to a frantic effort to bring them back.
“An average person who did something as incompetent as ‘accidentally cancelling Ebola prevention’ wouldn’t be applauded, they’d be fired,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), in a statement posted to social media.
