Elon Musk’s Efficiency Agency Turns Out to Be Just Another Scam

The much-discussed Department of Government Efficiency is finally coming to fruition—but it’s not the stringent, $2 trillion cost-cutting agency that Elon Musk had promised.

Instead, the executive order Donald Trump signed Monday night officially actualizing the executive branch division is a simple rebrand of something that already exists: the U.S. Digital Service, which has little to do with budget cuts.

“The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” the executive order reads.

Part of the mandate includes the development of a subagency, named the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which will be “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.” The temporary subagency will expire on July 4, 2026. The administrator overseeing DOGE will report to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

And in reality, it appears that more bureaucracy will be on the agenda for the memeified division: The executive order requires the hiring of four-person “DOGE teams” for each agency (very efficient, much cost-cutting). They will include an agency-related team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist, and an attorney, per the order, all in an effort to further advance Trump’s vague and unclear DOGE agenda.

Another executive order further grants DOGE a level of responsibility for enacting a federal hiring plan.

“The Federal Hiring Plan shall provide specific best practices for the human resources function in each agency, which each agency head shall implement, with advice and recommendations as appropriate from DOGE,” the order, titled “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” reads.

The first job gutted by DOGE was apparently one of its own potential co-chairs, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy’s, who was ousted from Trumpworld in recent weeks for seemingly grating on the “rank and file” of the cost-cutting department. Last week, Trump personally implored Ramaswamy to consider taking Ohio’s Senate seat, recently vacated by Vice President JD Vance, if it was offered to him by Governor Mike DeWine. (Of course, it wasn’t, and the billionaire is instead expected to announce a bid to replace the term-limited governor in 2026.)

Musk has promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget under the helm of the agency, a sum that constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending. Doing so would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and all federal agencies.

On the second day of his presidency, Donald Trump secured yet another victory from his ally Judge Aileen Cannon.

Cannon on Tuesday blocked the Justice Department from sharing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Trump’s classified documents case with select members of Congress. The move is the latest example of Cannon’s deferential treatment to the president, including dismissing the classified documents case six months ago.

While Cannon didn’t block the entire report, protecting a selected volume is certainly to Trump’s advantage. Appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020, Cannon presided over his classified documents case and helped the president every step of the way, drawing criticism even from Trump’s former lawyers.

Smith resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month and in November ended his cases on Trump’s 2020 election meddling and hoarding of classified documents. However, he wasn’t issued a preemptive presidential pardon by President Biden, unlike others, and may find himself targeted by Trump’s Justice Department.

The report is the last unresolved part of the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were rendered moot by his election victory in November. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Trump will likely never see any legal consequences from the crimes he allegedly committed, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. For the next four years, as Trump repeatedly stretches the law to his advantage, the public will ask what could have been done to hold him accountable after 2020.

This story has been updated.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is threatening to bring news outlets that accurately report on Elon Musk’s horrific Sieg Heil before Congress.

PBS News shared an unedited clip on X Monday of the billionaire technocrat speaking at a post-inauguration event for Donald Trump, when he did “what appeared to be a fascist salute,” the outlet wrote.

Musk “[put] his hand on his chest and then [raised] it in a salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by Nazis at their victory rallies,” PBS wrote.

And Musk didn’t just do it once; he did it twice in a row.

But PBS’s reporting includes the essential word “appeared,” which is typically used by journalists to indicate that while describing something cannot necessarily determine its nature, one can understand something’s nature through describing it.

One might write that it was a Sieg Heil because that’s clearly what it was. But many outlets are declining to do so, for a slate of reasons that range from an abundance of caution to blatant cowardice. Fox News, for example, suggested that Musk—who previously voiced his support for Germany’s far-right party and a British neo-Nazi—had simply made a “questionable salute.”

Greene, who has pushed her own antisemitic conspiracy theories from time to time, came to Musk’s rescue from the dastardly American public broadcaster.

“As the Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE, I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds. We will be in touch soon,” Greene wrote Monday night.

Greene would have PBS testify to the dispassionate description of Musk’s apparent triumphant fascist salute, as if Congress doesn’t have enough of its own problems right now.

Not only is it not surprising that Greene would defend Musk from allegations of Nazism, it’s also not surprising that a MAGA Republican would target PBS. Trump has previously attacked publicly funded media such as NPR and PBS, and ye olde authoritarian playbook for Trump’s incoming administration, Project 2025, called for the government to strip federal funding and licenses for noncommercial education stations.

Donald Trump on Monday pardoned or commuted the sentences of every single person criminally charged for the January 6 insurrection. Known violent extremists are now walking free.

Trump’s sweeping pardon affects more than 1,500 defendants—including some of the most notorious.

Enrique Tarrio, the former national leader of the Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy over his role in planning January 6, is now a free man. So is Guy Reffitt, a Three Percenter who touted a gun and helped lead the rioters to the Capitol. The baseball bat–wielding Jake Lang is also free after continuing his alt-right activities from prison. Julian Khater, who pepper-sprayed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick in the face, was similarly freed. Sicknick died the day after the attack.

Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, who stormed through a shattered window in the Senate building, was pardoned of his 10-year sentence. Fellow Proud Boys Ethan Nordean and Joe Biggs, who coordinated breaches of police lines, were also pardoned.  

A notable commutation was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whom a federal judge described as “frightening.” 

Trump delivered quickly on a core campaign promise, issuing the pardons within hours of his swearing in. This is a massive level of vindication for a group who viewed themselves as the victims the entire time. 

Donald Trump has been in office for less than 24 hours, but his administration is already working overtime to strip personnel from the executive branch who “are not aligned” with Trump’s “vision to Make America Great Again.”

In a late-night post to Truth Social, the forty-seventh president promised that his Presidential Personnel Office is “actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration.” That staggering number includes four people whom Trump felt compelled to call out by name: José Andrés from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition; Mark Milley from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council; Brian Hook from the Wilson Center for Scholars; and Keisha Lance Bottoms from the President’s Export Council.

“YOU’RE FIRED!” Trump wrote.

On Monday, Trump effectively reinstated Schedule F by an executive order under a different name, streamlining the process of ridding the executive branch of employees that he considers disloyal. And if Project 2025—the presidential transition blueprint that Trump and his allies have since fessed up is more or less the plan—are anything to go by, that could ultimately involve replacing tens of thousands of career employees with 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists. In July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts promised the project had already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees.

Minutes after Trump was sworn in, a portrait hanging in the Pentagon of former Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley—who refused Trump’s orders to send the military to crush protesters in Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and who has since referred to Trump as a “fascist” and a “wannabe dictator”—was suddenly stripped from the wall. (Former President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Milley on Monday, saving him from the Trump administration’s litigious ire.)

But the forced exit didn’t seem to bother everyone on the receiving end of it. The first person named in Trump’s post, Andrés, wrote later on X that he had already submitted his resignation last week, since his two-year term had expired.

“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members—unpaid volunteers like me—were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day,” Andres wrote. “May God give you the wisdom, Mr. President, to put politics and name calling aside … and instead lift up the everyday people working to bring America together. Let’s build longer tables.”

Bottoms similarly quit weeks before Trump supposedly ousted her. On Tuesday, the former Atlanta mayor shared her resignation notice to the Biden administration, dated January 4.

Trump has repeatedly promised to enact revenge on individuals he deemed to be “enemies of the state.” In the weeks leading up to the election, former Trump White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews warned that the ex-reality TV star had morphed from someone with a vision for America into a vindictive far-right ideologue “hellbent on revenge and retribution.”

This story has been updated.

On Monday evening, just hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Senate passed the Laken Riley Act, an extreme bill that would allow for the deportation and detention of any undocumented immigrant merely suspected of a nonviolent crime. And they did it with the help of 12 Democrats.

The bill passed 64-35 with only 35 Democrats, including independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, voting against it. Democrats Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman co-sponsored the bill along with Republican Katie Britt.

The bill, which is likely to be signed into law by Trump, would only require an arrest, not a conviction or charge, to target an undocumented immigrant for federal detention and possible deportation. The bill does not include protections for children or DACA recipients.

Many Democrats sought to enact changes to the bill, hoping to strip out some of its worst features, like the lack of protection for minors. Ultimately, the only amendments to the bill came from Republicans: One from Senator John Cornyn that requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who attack law enforcement, and another from Joni Ernst, which expands the bill to include undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes.

The following Democrats voted to enact the Laken Riley Act:

1. Catherine Cortez Masto—Nevada
2. John Fetterman—Pennsylvania (co-sponsor)
3. Ruben Gallego—Arizona (co-sponsor)
4. Maggie Hassan—New Hampshire
5. Mark Kelly—Arizona
6. Jon Ossoff—Georgia
7. Gary Peters—Michigan
8. Jacky Rosen—Nevada
9. Jeanne Shaheen—New Hampshire
10. Elissa Slotkin—Michigan
11. Mark Warner—Virginia
12. Raphael Warnock—Georgia
    

Donald Trump is already failing the implicit geography test that is taking office as the president of the United States.

Just hours after being sworn in Monday, a reporter asked Trump about his demand that NATO member states spend at least five percent of their GDP on defense, citing Spain’s defense spending level. The president responded completely incorrectly.

“Spain is very low. And yet, are they a BRICS nation?” Trump asked.

“What?” the reporter replied.

“They’re a BRICS nation, Spain. You know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out,” Trump said, managing to be both snide and wrong.

“But uh, and if the BRICS nations want to do that, that’s OK, but we’re gonna put at least 100 percent tariff on the business they do with the United States,” Trump said.

The ‘S’ in BRICS does not stand for Spain at all.

The countries in BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and new member states Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, UAE, and Iran. No state in the entire European Union is a member of BRICS. Here’s hoping that the president of the United States will eventually “figure it out.”

Mehdi Hasan, the editor-and-chief of Zeteo News, shared a video of Trump’s gaffe on X late Monday, writing, “We need to talk about the president’s age and memory and mental health.”

“If Biden had said this, it would be on a 24/7 loop on cable, and all over TikTok,” Hasan wrote in a separate post on X.

Donald Trump has been president for less than a day, and Elon Musk already has a White House email address—and is expected to receive office space as well. 

The Hill reports that the world’s richest man, who will be the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (that isn’t officially a government department) already has an email address searchable by the Executive Office of the President, according to an unnamed source. 

“It seems to confirm he’s going to have an [Eisenhower Executive Office Building] office,” the source said. According to The New York Times, however, Musk will likely be granted even greater access with a coveted West Wing office in the White House, where the Oval Office is located. 

How often Musk will actually use that office isn’t clear, considering that the tech mogul also serves as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owns X (formerly Twitter),  has 12 children with three different mothers, and spends his free time cheating in online gaming. But spending $250 million to help Trump get elected seems to buy a lot of access to the president. 

Earlier on Monday, Vivek Ramaswamy, who was expected to be co-chair of DOGE with Musk, was forced out of the non-department, allegedly for wearing out his welcome. This gives Musk near-total control of an entity charged with reducing the size of the federal government, where he will surely try to slash anything Trump and the MAGA right think isn’t important. 

Less than two weeks ago, DOGE reportedly had 50 employees working out of SpaceX’s D.C. offices, with that number expected to double by Inauguration Day. With his own small army in tow, it seems that Musk will have the ear of President Trump whenever he wants, only having to walk a short distance to the Oval Office if he so chooses.

Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural entourage was noticeably more flush than the crowd at his first presidential ceremony, with the attendees’ total net worth approaching $1.2 trillion. The New Republic broke down the net worths of the attendees with the biggest pockets.

• Donald Trump

Trump himself is worth upwards of $60 billion as of Monday. That’s in large part thanks to his memeified crypto coin, $TRUMP, which skyrocketed in value on Sunday, bringing his holdings to an astonishing $58 billion, according to Axios. That’s enough to jettison him into the top 25 wealthiest people in the world, according to data from Forbes’s real time billionaires list.

• Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg
  

Trump’s inauguration saw a band of Silicon Valley’s top leaders appear on the metaphorical dais, representing a prioritization of the tech industry’s interests on the eve of a new administration. The trio, on their own, represent the three richest people in the world. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is worth $433.9 billion. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos comes second with an estimated net worth of $239.4 billion. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pulls right behind Bezos, with a net worth hovering around $211.8 billion, according to Forbes.

Altogether, the three men are worth upwards of $885.1 billion. The median net worth of an American, meanwhile, is $192,200, according to Investopedia.

• Sam Altman, Tim Cook
  

Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook were also present in the Capitol Rotunda Monday after donating millions to his inaugural fund. Altman’s estimated net worth is $1.1 billion, while Cook’s estimated net worth is $2.2 billion, per Forbes.

• Shou Zi Chew
  

TikTok’s CEO received a last-minute invite to Trump’s celebration, as the pair are reportedly working toward a solution to keep the popular video-sharing platform alive in the U.S. market. But the Singaporean executive’s presence at the inauguration also bumped up the total net worth of its attendees, adding some $200 million to the pot, according to the New York Banner.

• Rev. Franklin Graham
  

Televangelist minister Reverend Franklin Graham gave a short sermon on Trump’s behalf Monday, standing before the crowd to bestow a blessing of success and protection on the 47th president, who over the course of his campaign survived two assassination attempts. Estimates for Graham’s net worth vary wildly, though his total value is believed to be somewhere around $10 million. 

• Vivek Ramaswamy
  

Vivek Ramaswamy has been a presence by Trump’s side for the better part of the last year, supporting and bolstering Trump’s ideals to the American public. The biotech executive’s net worth is estimated at just over $1 billion, according to The Economic Times. Though all the money in the world apparently isn’t enough to stay in Trump’s good graces, especially now that the 47th president is out of the campaign cycle. Reports swirled on Monday that Ramaswamy was on the outs of Trumpworld, even reportedly exiting the not-yet-real Department of Government Efficiency in favor of running to replace  term-limited Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.

The impact of Trump’s anti-immigrant policy at the southern border was felt the minute he reassumed the presidency.

People were sobbing at the U.S.-Mexico border Monday afternoon after an app to book appointments with Customs and Border Patrol went offline.

“Migrants in Ciudad Juárez who were waiting for their 1pm CBP1 parole appointments learned 20 minutes ago that the app has shut down & those appointments are no longer valid,” said The Washington Post’s Arelis R. Hernández, who was at the scene.

The CBP One app was a critical resource for people looking to enter the United States, allowing them to check border wait times, get their products inspected, and most importantly, schedule appointments in hopes of entering the country legally. But on Monday, the app went dark right as Trump was getting sworn in, and all the appointments afterwards were cancelled. In Biden’s term, the app helped an estimated 930,000 people schedule appointments, according to federal officials.

“Effective January 20, 2025, the functionalities of CBP One™ that previously allowed undocumented aliens to submit advance information and schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry is no longer available, and existing appointments have been cancelled,” the Customs and Border Patrol website reads.

“The people losing CBP One appointments were patiently waiting in Mexico & complying with a smart process that could modernize asylum,” wrote Buzzfeed Tech’s Andrea Flores. “Eliminating CBPOne is not only deeply unfair to the human beings who were following the rules, but this move will destabilize the border.”

This kicks off Trump’s draconian immigration plans, including what he promises to be the “largest deportation program in US history.” He either already has or plans to later sign multiple executive orders regarding the border: declaring a state of emergency there, labeling drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, directing the military to concentrate on the southern border, and attempting to revoke birthright citizenship.

The specific result of the CBP One app’s closure remains to be seen.

“The CBP1 app is credited for moving migrants into a lawful process of entry since it created an orderly system of proof, all on the other side of the US border,” professor Juliette Kayyem wrote. “Trump argues ending it means they will stop trying to enter. History suggests many will just try unlawfully.”

The hardline shift to the right on immigration is materializing even faster than anticipated. Communities everywhere can only prepare.