The Strange Death of Trump's Signature Policy
On DOGE's demise and government-by-chaos.
‘Member DOGE? ‘Member the excitement that the year started out with? There was Elon with a buzzsaw. There was a righteous effort to shed $1 trillion—or maybe it was $2 trillion?—from the federal budget.
If that strikes only a distant chord, maybe it’s because it’s been lost in all the other swirling promises with which Trump started his second term. There was going to be the annexation of Greenland—“one way or the other we’re going to get it,” Trump announced in March—and which was then, according to an actual House of Representatives bill, going to be called “Red, White, and Blueland.” And then the Panama Canal was going to be taken “back,” as Trump vowed in his inaugural address, and then Canada was going to be the 51st state.
These things do stick in one’s memory. What leaves less of an impression is the denouement—is the inglorious end of DOGE, which signaled its demise in June when “staffers packed up their clothes and bedding” from the government building where they had been sleeping for months and which then was pronounced dead in November with the terse statement of Office of Personnel Management head Scott Kupor that “that doesn’t exist” when somebody thought to ask him about DOGE. And, as for Red, White, and Blueland? The “taking back” of the Canal Zone? Canada as the 51st state?
Somewhere in the same bin of neglected projects along with DOGE.
So what exactly do we do with this? What do we make of being, basically, jerked around by the headlines of the last calendar year? Well, there are two ways to think about it. One is that it’s all part of the cunning of the Trump administration—a “flood the zone” strategy in which opponents are distracted by some of the surface outrages while Trump’s more disciplined shock troops create lasting change within the body politic. If you believe that, then the Greenland, Panama, and Canada threats are all fanfare to appeal to the six-year-old boy in all of us, while what really matters is the deployment of troops to American cities, the often-sadistic deportations, and significant reallocations of the federal budget. The other way to think about it is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that Trump in the second term is fundamentally as chaotic as he’s always been, that there was no master plan beyond what was executed in the first few months of his return to office, and now the administration is just flailing around without any particular idea of what it wants to achieve. If that’s the case, those worried about the Trump administration can breathe something like a sigh of relief. Trump hasn’t magically become a canny puller of administrative levers, as he often seemed to be in early 2025. He is distracted and prone to losing interest in initiatives almost as soon as he launches them—and he may well find himself on the back foot by the time the 2026 midterms roll around.
And if it’s possible to see the Trump administration without its bluster, we find ourselves looking at the shape of something that much more resembles the first term than what we thought we were dealing with for most of 2025. And the first term was in many ways much less consequential than it seemed when Trump was elected in 2016. There were deep corporate tax cuts. There was a business-first policy that kept the stock market high but gave short shrift to everything else. And the overall capacity of the state was quietly chipped away at. When an actual crisis arrived with the 2020 pandemic, it was up to individual states to handle the response, which they did with precious little coordination from the White House.
This iteration of Trump comes with a few new notes—the assault on universities and law firms, the rollback of civil rights legislation, the deep cuts into the federal workforce. These aren’t to be underestimated. The deployment of troops to American cities and the mass immigration raids push American politics into a dangerously unprecedented space, and the entire balance of power between the executive and congressional branches has been disrupted.
But if we extrapolate out from the present moment, the enduring legacy of the Trump administration may well be chaos and missing receipts. That’s what DOGE, after all the sound and fury, amounted to. In October, The New York Times attempted to report on how much money DOGE had actually cut and concluded the following: “Outside budget experts can’t nail down a number. Even congressional appropriators—the people who decide how federal funds should be spent in the first place—don’t know. And the public may never have a clear answer.”
In other words, we just have absolutely no idea. Estimates range from the $214 billion in savings that DOGE claimed to $14 billion in rescission requests that were actually submitted to Congress to $410 billion of “a larger universe” of frozen allocations that Democrats say never reached their Congressionally-mandated recipients. According to the White House, it wasn’t that DOGE disappeared altogether after June, it was that its responsibilities were distributed around different agencies, above all to the all-powerful White House Office of Management and Budget, while much of that money has entered a black hole. The movement of allocated Congressional money is supposed to be readily transparent, but the OMB removed a legally required public database tracking those payments and many of them were held up on a variety of technicalities. Which, as often as not, seems to be the last anybody ever hears of those appropriations. “There absolutely must be [unspent money]—they did cancel a bunch of contracts worth a lot of money,” American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus told The New York Times in reference to DOGE. “There are open questions about, Where did that money go?”
When I spoke to him, Malkus described miscounting in all kinds of directions. On the one hand, DOGE employed a kind of creative accounting that vastly overestimated the savings it would achieve from canceled contracts. On the other hand, there’s money that genuinely was cut—Malkus estimates about $16 billion—that hasn’t been returned to the Treasury and has entered into what Malkus calls “an accounting abyss” in which most of the money is likely sitting with the appropriate agency but can’t be used for a new purpose or program without a fresh appropriation.
Not quite the crusade for transparency in government that was indicated when Elon waved a buzzsaw on a stage in February, let alone the $5,000 dividend check for individual Americans that Trump said was a possibility back when Elon was saving “so many millions, billions—hundreds of billions,” as Trump itemized it with his own less-than-precise accounting.
All of this may be starting to feel a bit familiar. During his first term Trump managed to add somewhere on the order of $8 trillion to the national deficit, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That borrowing was largely needed to cover the loss of around $2.5 trillion in tax revenues stemming from Trump’s cuts. And when all is said and done, that’s what the bottom-line of the first term looked like: debt added, services cut, and the state unable to generate a meaningful coordinated response to the pandemic—although, when in panic-mode, it did eventually add $3.6 trillion to the debt line in Covid relief.
It’s still possible that things may get worse than that. Trump’s campaign trail isolationism has given way to a schoolboy’s joy in ordering bombing strikes all over the world—against Yemen, against Iran, against alleged drug smugglers off Venezuela. He could easily find himself pulled into a major war somewhere or other. But now that we’re approaching the one-year mark, a more sober view of the Trump administration comes into focus—that the new boss looks a lot like the old boss, and that distractibility and chaos predominate over the jackbooted sheen that the Trump 2.0 legionnaires sometimes seem to possess. There has been a lot of big talk from the White House, a lot of territories that were supposed to be American by now, but as we take our brief glimpse of the graveyard of forgotten initiatives out the rear view window, the pattern that is most apparent is the chaos, the missing money, and the state getting weaker as a result—which, if the last time around is any indication, will only become fully apparent at the moment when you most need a state.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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I have seen it pointed out that the destruction of USAID was not important to Trump's base and was not an issue he campaigned on. It was all Musk's idea. And Musk would have cared about it, apparently, because USAID played a significant role in the ending of apartheid.
Puts a new spin on Musk's Nazi salute, doesn't it?
In Agatha Christie's great mystery _The A.B.C. Murders_, the killer commits a series of four murders, trying to make them look like random acts of a madman; but in fact, one of the killings is quite calculated — the others are just decoys. I submit that the same thing has happened here. Musk's goal was to obliterate USAID; everything else was just distraction. And as with Sir Carmichael Clark, Christie's perpetrator, the fact that that other people had to die — hundreds of thousands, in the case of USAID — was of no consequence to Musk.