How Musk Is Running DOGE Like Twitter | WSJ

- This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. - [Announcer] In President Donald Trump's first month in office, Elon Musk has been busy. - DOGE is now everywhere in the federal government, and they are spreading like bedbugs.

- What Musk is doing is illegal and unconstitutional. - They wouldn't be complaining so much if we weren't doing something useful. - [Narrator] And the playbook looks familiar.

- The Twitter playbook feels like it's being applied now at scale. - [Narrator] Two million federal employees received a buyout offer with a subject line identical to buyout offers sent at Twitter, but-- - It's one thing for Musk to blow up Twitter after buying it. It's another thing entirely to do it at government.

- [Narrator] Here's how Musk's management style is being applied to the government and what it tells us about what lies ahead. Musk is moving at a breakneck pace with DOGE's government cuts. - We are moving fast, so we all make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly.

- [Narrator] Under DOGE's guidance, in its first month, the administration says it's let go of dozens of senior officials, take an aim at more than 200,000 probationary employees and canceled nearly 100 federal office leases. The fast focus cuts mirror his moves at Twitter, where shortly after taking over, he fired Twitter's top executives and board, let go of roughly three quarters of the staff and lapsed on paying leases for offices. That's because Musk's overhaul philosophy is built around making fast, dramatic changes.

- They're not sitting around thinking about what they should be doing. He would rather try to fix something, try to go forward to be successful, and if it's not working, change course and try something else. - [Narrator] But many of Musk's critics say the speed at which he's working isn't appropriate for government.

- A lot of stuff in business, when you try something new and it goes wrong, the investors get hurt, right? People lose money, but it doesn't affect anybody's lives. Screw up social security, screw up veterans' benefits.

Screw up our health agencies, which are looking to stop illnesses. You have live or die decisions. - [Narrator] Elaine Kamarck was a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and helped orchestrate the largest modern government reform during his administration.

- The biggest difference between what we did and what's happening now is that we were concerned with making the government work better as well as costless. And right now they're just doing costless. - [Narrator] But it's not just how much or how fast Musk is cutting.

It's also who he's choosing to cut. In the run-up to the election, Musk alluded to Dojo's potential cuts in a post on X, in which he shared an interview with the late economist, Milton Friedman. - Department of Agriculture.

- Abolish. - Gone, Department of Commerce. - Abolish.

- Gone, Department of Defense? - Keep. - Keep it, Department of Education.

- Abolish. - Gone. - [Narrator] For justification for many of the cuts, Musk has pointed to the Government Accountability Office or GAO.

In a report from last year, the GAO estimated that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. So far, DOGE has looked to make major cuts to agencies like the US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. At his companies, he's focused on cutting roles that he doesn't see as core to the mission.

- We've seen that also at Tesla when it was in financial difficulties years ago. He might cut sales, he might cut HR, he might cut people in marketing and ensure that the resources were there for the factory, the people making the cars, the engineers putting these cars together because in his mind, it is all about the product. - [Narrator] Under Musk's, Twitter abandoned restrictions around content like COVID-19 misinformation and reinstated accounts that had been banned by the previous management.

- So the trust and safety team was targeted with a particular ferocity and intensity, as well as teams like Twitter curation and other teams that did philanthropic work, for example. - [Narrator] Theodora Skeadas managed the Trust and Safety Council at Twitter. She says that some of the teams Musk cut are responsible for things like consumer protection.

- I see a really strong parallel between the scaling back of protections and support services for folks globally at X and then that happening in federal government in particular through agencies like USAID and State Department, but others as well. - [Narrator] X didn't respond to a request for comment. Musk has also brought on a team of trusted allies to make cuts at DOGE.

Former SpaceX and Tesla employees, recent graduates and his own loyalist colleagues. At the helm is Steve Davis, a former boring company executive who was also brought on to help with cuts of Twitter. - It's about finding talent, deploying them, riding them very hard to get what he wants out of them.

They understand his thinking and have also earned his trust and shown that they can get things done for him, and that's key. Musk doesn't really trust a lot of people. - [Narrator] His approach at Twitter was similar.

- We saw Musk tap some of his engineers, including some young ones from around the Musk universe to get into Twitter and interview the employees there to go through lines of code to really inspect how the company was operating. - [Narrator] But Kamarck is skeptical that this approach could work at the scale of the US government. - The way we did it was we brought in civil servants who were familiar with government operations.

What they're doing is they're going into the agencies and they're going straight to databases. The people who are looking at these databases don't have any context. They're kids, they're 25 years old, one is 19.

- [Narrator] To date, DOGE said it has identified more than $55 billion in savings, a number a Wall Street journal analysis found to be overstated. It is also far less than the $2 trillion Musk said the agency plans to trim. - They make for the appearance of progress of victories in the day to day.

It's a lot of fun to have tweets out there making fun of various weird spending, but hundreds of thousands of dollars here and millions of dollars there ultimately don't sway the massive US federal budget. - [Narrator] DOGE is also taking a look at bigger agencies like the Department of Defense, which has a far larger and more complex budget. The department employs three million troops and civilians and has a budget in excess of $800 billion, accounting for at least 12% of the $6.

75 trillion federal budget. - The government's in a hard place right now, okay? Because as we begin to see failure, which we will see because they have cut in such a sort of all across the board way, they're gonna have to hire back people.

Who knows if people will want to come back? - [Narrator] The cuts have raised legal questions and already sparked a series of lawsuits. - This is a challenge that we've seen time and time again.

Business leaders go into government. It's not as simple as just saying, let's do X, Y, or Z. There's more bureaucracy.

There's more stakeholders out there. Right now, he's pulling the levers that allow him to kind of show some successes, but it's gonna be a lot of work. Ultimately, it's about building the vision to get enough people on board to kind of support him as he moves towards that over time.

A lot of people say it's impossible and it might be impossible, but even if he gets close to it, it would be rather remarkable. - The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that.