Tangle - The latest on Musk and DOGE.

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Today's read: 13 minutes.

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Second, on Friday, Executive Editor Isaac Saul will return from paternity leave with a subscribers-only edition reacting to the first month of Trump’s presidency. 

Quick hits.

1. President Donald Trump said he has the power to end the war in Ukraine, suggesting that Ukraine bears responsibility for the conflict and has failed to make a deal to end it. (The comments) Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States would establish a team to work toward negotiating an end to the Ukraine war following a meeting with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia. Rubio also said the U.S. and Russia have agreed to re-establish staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow. (The comments)
2. Border Patrol said it arrested 29,000 unauthorized migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2025, the lowest monthly total since May 2020. (The report)
3. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said he would step down from his position, which he was appointed to in 2020. (The announcement) Separately, Jim Jones, the head of the food division at the Food and Drug Administration, resigned, citing recent layoffs at the agency. (The resignation)
4. The Senate voted 51-45 to confirm Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary. (The confirmation)
5. Extreme cold warnings were issued for 11 U.S. states due to a polar vortex, the 10th such weather event in the U.S. this winter. The warnings followed a series of storms across the eastern United States over the weekend, which killed at least 14 people. (The weather)

Today's topic.

Updates on the Department of Government Efficiency. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, has gained access or attempted to gain access to numerous departments across the federal government for its cost-cutting initiatives. The actions have prompted state attorneys general to file suits blocking DOGE from accessing confidential data, and in the past week several U.S. district judges have issued temporary rulings on the ongoing challenges. 

On Monday, DOGE published a “Wall of Receipts” detailing contracts and federal real estate holdings it has identified and cut from the federal budget. It claims to have saved $55 billion, but an itemization of the savings on their website currently totals $16.6 billion, though that figure is disputed. As part of its savings, it has recommended firing thousands of government employees.

You can read our previous coverage of DOGE here.

The court cases: Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas extended an order blocking DOGE employees from accessing Treasury Department data. The injunction followed a lawsuit from 19 state attorneys general on constitutional and privacy grounds. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss denied a challenge from the University of California Student Association to block DOGE from accessing Department of Education data.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request from 14 Democratic state attorneys general to issue a temporary restraining order on DOGE access to federal departments. Chutkan, who oversaw Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against President Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election, ruled that the attorneys general had not shown that “immediate and irreparable injury” would follow DOGE’s actions. However, Chutkan appeared open to arguments that DOGE’s actions were in violation of the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. 

The receipts: On its official website, the Department of Government Efficiency has itemized the contracts and savings it has cut from the federal budget, committing to real-time updates twice a week. Of the $55 billion DOGE has claimed, it has only itemized approximately $17 billion — although the website notes that termination notices issued by DOGE make up 20% of its savings and will have a one-month lag before they are reported through the Federal Procurement Data System. Additionally, $8 billion of the savings has come from a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was erroneously listed in 2022 and was actually worth $8 million. DOGE has corrected the contract, but as of publication has not adjusted the total savings it claims.

The controversies: On Sunday, the Trump administration halted the firing of nearly 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work with the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and is attempting to rehire most of the released workers back. The employees were dismissed on Thursday as part of a wider DOGE firing of roughly 2,000 employees across the Department of Energy. Also on Sunday, a memorandum within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) leaked to The Washington Post indicated that DOGE was seeking access to a data system with personally identifying and banking information of U.S. citizens. On Monday, Acting Social Security Administration Commissioner Michelle King resigned from her post in protest of DOGE’s request to access private taxpayer information. Leland Dudek will lead the agency until the Senate confirms King’s permanent replacement.

We’ll get into what the right and left are saying about DOGE’s cost-cutting initiative, then Tangle Editor Will Kaback gives his take while Executive Editor Isaac Saul is on paternity leave.

What the right is saying.

• The right is mostly supportive of DOGE’s efforts, arguing they are ambitious and focused on the right issues.
• Some caution that the agency’s efforts require a gentler hand in some areas of government. 
• Others say Trump should take steps to make DOGE’s recommended changes permanent.

National Review’s editors wrote about “the truth about DOGE.”

“DOGE’s critics are premature, hysterical, and perverted by a peculiar legal theory that has no footing in the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the president has plenary authority over the executive branch to run as he sees fit, with the significant exception that he must carry out tasks given him by Congress,” the editors said. “Thus far, DOGE has represented nothing more dramatic than an audit of federal spending of the sort in which the president of the United States — acting via any agent he sees fit to name — is self-evidently permitted to engage.”

“Nevertheless, Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to recover ‘trillions’ of dollars is absurd. Because we disapprove of any waste in government, we will be grateful for whatever he uncovers. But, even if he is successful beyond his wildest dreams, he is not going to alter the fundamental realities of the American fisc,” the editors wrote. “Still, one ought not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The unresponsiveness of the bureaucracy is one of the biggest threats to our constitutional order… DOGE cannot solve this problem alone, but, providing that it works within the limits of its legitimate power, it can make itself extremely useful to those who desire reform.”

In The New York Post, Howard Husock said DOGE must be cautious in aspects of its approach. 

“No one who believes in limited government can do anything other than endorse the Trump Administration’s willingness to question and winnow the profusion of federal agencies. Carving out unnecessary and divisive programs focused on race or unachievable climate goals makes sense,” Husock wrote. “But those of us rooting for the president and Elon Musk should also be concerned about a risk the Department of Government Efficiency may pose — not just for unproductive civil servants and the Deep State but for the success of the Trump Administration.

“Call it the risk of the ‘Hollow State’ — a government stripped not just of waste, fraud, and abuse but of its capacity to respond to crisis, and perform the core jobs the American people actually want the government to do and assumes it can do so capably,” Husock said. “As it casts aside decades of waste, the White House should consider identifying — and even exempting — agencies and functions integral to government and which Americans agree must be capably staffed. A lean government should be the goal for Trump — because a hollow government is in no American’s best interest, not even Elon Musk.”

In The Washington Examiner, Marc Short explored “how to make [the DOGE] cuts permanent.”

“DOGE is poised to disrupt a complacent government of bureaucrats and finally cultivate accountability, transparency, and efficiency for taxpayers. After decades of rampant spending on ridiculous pet projects, it is well past time an agency was created to look inward and audit federal spending,” Short said. “Trump should be commended for prioritizing this initiative and including it in his day-one presidential actions. It gives teeth to his campaign promise of unburdening the American people from the crippling consequences of government mismanagement.”

“In the coming weeks, Musk and his team will also likely target the massive amounts of healthcare spending and education funding. Together with other Trump Cabinet members, he will cut back gratuitous governmental expenses that drain our citizens’ pockets and undermine our national strength,” Short wrote. “While its initial success is encouraging, DOGE is set to close its doors in July 2026, and most of DOGE’s gains have been made through temporary executive orders… Trump and Musk should call on Congress to put the DOGE executive orders into law.”

What the left is saying.

• The left is critical of DOGE’s actions, framing Musk’s approach as focused on style over substance.
• Some say Musk has failed to produce evidence of fraud at the Social Security Administration.
• Others suggest DOGE should focus on different government agencies to more effectively target waste. 

In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore wrote “DOGE is about ideology and mindless budget-cutting, not efficiency.”

“Musk clearly loves to depict DOGE as a lean, mean efficiency machine. But it seems increasingly obvious that its efforts to reduce personnel levels and spending mostly reflect an ideology that treats whole areas of government as illegitimate, and completely arbitrary reductions in force as a valuable end in themselves,” Kilgore said. “In most cases their legal rationale is as an exercise of executive-branch agency management rather than a usurpation of the congressional policy-making that has shaped most of what bureaucrats do. But in reality, DOGE’s ‘savings’ mostly fall into two baskets that have nothing to do with efficiency or rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.”

“All along, Musk has been focused on adding notches to his belt: achieving pulled-out-of-the-air but impressive sounding amounts of alleged savings, rather than making government less wasteful or more accountable,” Kilgore wrote. “So don’t be too fooled by the smoke and mirrors of DOGE technological virtuosity in doing its job… Musk regards even good government as inherently wasteful, which in turn makes efforts to improve what taxpayers get for their money a waste of time.”

In Bloomberg, Justin Fox pushed back on Musk’s claims of “fraud” at the Social Security Administration.

“Sure, checks sometimes go out to recipients who shouldn’t receive them, with the SSA estimating that it made $13.6 billion in overpayments in the 2023 fiscal year. But that was out of $1.3 trillion in disbursements. Even if the actual overpayment amount is several times larger, it’s still not much relative to the huge scale of Social Security,” Fox said. “It is true that administering Social Security’s main program, Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, doesn’t involve a lot of judgment calls or customer input. You’re either old enough to qualify for benefits or you’re not, and you’re either alive or you’re not. But its efficiency is still impressive. OASI administrative costs amount to just 0.4% of total spending, down from 1.6% half a century ago.”

Musk’s claim “that ‘we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old’ was, while possibly accurate, [is] neither (1) news nor (2) necessarily indicative of a significant problem,” Fox added. “Government computer systems are full of legacy quirks like this, and upgrading and updating them is a huge and often-fraught endeavor. Social Security also has serious looming funding problems that are the product of its design and the aging of the US population, not its operations. Do Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have ideas for dealing with either of those issues? So far they’ve given no sign of it.”

In Newsweek, Ben Cohen and Justin Goodman argued “DOGE should take a look at wasteful Pentagon spending.”

“Cleaning up the DOD's waste is an issue that has united folks across the political spectrum, presenting a rare opportunity for bipartisanship within President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's newly formed Department of Government Efficiency,” Cohen and Goodman said. “The DOD's waste spans the globe, and not just for war. In a 2024 report, the DOD's Office of the Inspector General found that the agency shipped $1.4 billion in taxpayer money to foreign research laboratories between 2014 and 2023. An audit requested by Senate DOGE Caucus Chair Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), an Army veteran, determined that the DOD couldn't account for this spending.”

Additionally, “the Office of the Inspector General… wrote that ‘DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential.’ Not tracking whether U.S. tax dollars were used to engineer superviruses in adversarial nations seems like a pretty egregious and dangerous oversight failure,” Cohen and Goodman wrote. “If DOGE is serious about cutting waste, it needs to look first at the Pentagon.”

My take.

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• So far, DOGE has been haphazard and could hinder productivity more than help it.
• I’m most concerned by its involvements in the SSA and IRS, due to the sensitivity of the data housed by those agencies.
• That said, DOGE has uncovered some real fraud and could do more, and I don’t think many of its actions have been illegal.

While most of its actions seem to be legal, the Department of Government Efficiency, as led by Elon Musk, has not demonstrated sufficient competence to justify its requests for high-level access within the government. 

Before diving in, I want to echo something Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman wrote when we first covered this topic a few weeks back. To paraphrase, Ari said that supporting efforts to reduce government waste and opposing DOGE’s methods are not mutually exclusive. Since we published that edition, this notion has only become more resonant. 

My biggest concerns with DOGE’s activity are at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA). First, though, let’s examine DOGE’s recent efforts to address government waste.

On Monday, DOGE updated its website to include information about the $55 billion in savings it says it has generated through “a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.” Much of the website is incomplete (lacking full documentation for each entry), but it still contains valuable information about the cuts the group has been making. For example, almost all of the listed savings have come from contract cancellations, and many entries in the “savings” column are zero (seemingly because the contract in question had run its course). Other entries, however, show savings ranging from the thousands to the billions. We can’t fully assess these cuts without complete information on these contracts and why DOGE deemed them wasteful, but publishing this data is an encouraging act of transparency. 

After a cursory glance, many of DOGE’s cuts seem defensible — like eyebrow-raising contracts of $25 million for Agriculture Department DEI training or $4.5 million for “leadership development.” But these cuts are drops in the bucket relative to DOGE’s goal of trillions (or hundreds of billions) in spending reductions, and the sizable missteps they’re making in the process (which I’ll discuss below) do not engender confidence in their ability to do the job. All the while, daily federal outlays have actually increased in Trump’s second term compared to Biden’s first weeks in office. 

DOGE still needs to update its top-line savings to reflect the $8 billion/$8 million mixup in a Department of Homeland Security contract, which will decrease its total reported savings by roughly 14.5%. Regardless, more concerning than the accuracy of its savings numbers are its errors of improper diligence or rash decisions: the firing and attempted rehiring of hundreds of staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration; the apparent confusion over the meaning of “probationary” employees, leading to the firings of thousands of federal workers for allegedly invented claims of poor performance; hiring a staffer who had previously been fired by a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets; and putting Education Department employees on leave simply for attending a DEI training course encouraged by Trump’s education secretary during his first term. 

The lack of cogency is the most concerning aspect of these actions; Musk’s team is moving carelessly, leaning on artificial intelligence and a “move fast, break things” ethos to take blind swings at massive, complex agencies. As conservative writer John Podhoretz recently remarked, the government may be broken, but Musk’s approach is likely to “break it further.”

That brings me to the IRS and SSA. At the IRS, DOGE is seeking access to the agency’s Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), which contains personal identification numbers and bank information about every taxpayer, business, and nonprofit in the United States. The White House declined to offer a rationale for this request, other than to say that “waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”

This explanation is fundamentally irreconcilable with Musk’s insistence that “all aspects of the government must be fully transparent and accountable to the people.” It’s impossible to know what DOGE will do within one of the most protected data systems in the entire government, and the chance that they might find some waste or inefficiencies is not cause to do away with well established protocols managing access to the system. And again, DOGE has done little to prove its competence in managing sensitive information. 

With the SSA, Musk has demonstrated a lack of understanding of the systems he’s auditing. On Sunday, he posted a table purporting to show that millions of people over the age of 100 were receiving Social Security benefits, including some over the age of 150. Musk then said the discovery “might be the biggest fraud in history.” While Social Security fraud is real and well documented, the agency has already addressed the discrepancies that Musk highlighted. In 2015, the Office of the Inspector General for SSA released a report that explained the SSA’s system was not configured to account for people who had exceeded “maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased,” while a follow-up report found that “almost none” of the people in this group were receiving payments. It’s reasonable to say the SSA should update its codebase (the agency estimated that doing so would cost $9 million), but it’s not accurate to say this is evidence of fraud. 

Musk’s claims have the added effect of distracting from important areas of reform that DOGE should be targeting within the SSA, like modernizing the agency’s 60-year-old programming language. Additionally, there’s plenty of waste and fraud that we already know of for DOGE to target, like Employee Retention Credit fraud at the IRS and Medicare/Medicaid abuses. 

DOGE’s actions also risk short-term disruptions. Mass layoffs at the IRS during tax filing season seem like a recipe for inefficiency, while even a temporary disruption to Social Security payments amid upheaval at the agency would affect tens of millions of Americans. If pressing changes are needed, why can’t DOGE explain them in clear terms? Furthermore, why can’t they explain what steps are being taken to ensure critical government services continue to function? 

But I want to end by clarifying my criticism: I think DOGE has been rash, counter-productive, untrustworthy and inefficient, but I don’t think DOGE has acted illegally. Some judges have blocked its attempts to gain access to sensitive government systems, but these rulings are temporary and stop short of saying that DOGE has broken the law. At the same time, several other judges have ruled against challenges to DOGE’s access, often because the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. While the courts may establish some guardrails on the extent of DOGE’s actions, I think it’s unlikely that their access is significantly curtailed as long as they have the White House’s backing.

The most frustrating aspect of this story, to me, is that DOGE’s mission is something most Americans truly care about. We know a lot about government waste but have struggled to act on it. DOGE could be the catalyst to change course, but the group seems committed to a strategy of shock and awe over diligence and competence — with little to show for it thus far. 

Take the survey: What do you think of DOGE so far? Let us know!

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Can you explain the difference between Trump’s 2025 order regarding reinstatement of and back pay for military personnel who left active and reserve duty due to denying Covid vaccinations vs the 2023 legislation Biden signed regarding the same?

— Laree from Pittsburgh, PA

Aidan Gorman, Associate Producer: The short answer is that the law Biden signed and Trump’s executive order did two different things. First, in August 2021, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a memorandum to senior Pentagon leadership stating that the Covid-19 vaccine would become a mandatory requirement for all servicemembers; over 8,200 soldiers were discharged for failing to comply. 

In December 2022, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which rescinded the Covid-19 vaccine requirement. In January 2023, Secretary Austin sent another memorandum to senior Pentagon officials rescinding the vaccination directive in the 2021 memorandum but continuing to encourage vaccination. Servicemembers who were discharged solely due to not receiving the vaccine were able to petition to correct their records to a general discharge.

In 2023, the Department of Defense (DoD) invited discharged soldiers to re-enlist but only 113 did so. According to a DoD spokesman, the Biden administration would not pursue back pay for those who refused the vaccine and were discharged, stating, “At the time those orders were refused, it was a lawful order.”

President Trump shifted the government’s policy with an executive order signed on January 27, 2025, which ordered all servicemembers discharged due to “refusal to receive the COVID-19 vaccine” eligible for reinstatement to their former ranks and full back pay, benefits, and bonuses.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

The Los Angeles wildfires in January highlighted a critical issue with fire department resources: a dearth of operational fire trucks. In Los Angeles alone, dozens of rigs were out of service while the fires raged, due in part to faulty maintenance as well as industry disruption. According to a new analysis by The New York Times, efforts to consolidate the fire engine industry over the past two decades have led to higher profit margins but longer manufacturing times. Lingering supply chain issues and labor shortages from the pandemic have exacerbated the problem, and many fire departments across the United States face a multi-year wait to receive new engines. The New York Times has the story.

Numbers.

• $1.4 trillion. The estimated amount paid to recipients of Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) by the Social Security Administration in fiscal year 2023, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). 
• $3.3 billion. The amount of those payments estimated by OMB to be overpayments, approximately 0.24% of total outlays. 
• $644.5 billion. The total amount of "improper" and "unknown" payments from Medicaid between 2004 and 2023, the largest of any federal program.
• $570.0 billion. The total amount of "improper" and "unknown" payments from Medicare Fee-for-Service between 2004 and 2023, the second-largest of any federal program.
• $68.0 billion. The total amount of "improper" and "unknown" payments from OASDI between 2004 and 2023, the seventh-largest of any federal program.
• 33% and 23%. The percentage of applications and software used by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that are considered outdated, according to a 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office. 
• 67%. The percentage of U.S. adults who think the government is spending too little on Social Security, according to a January 2025 AP-NORC poll. 
• 38% and 50%. The percentage of Americans who have a favorable and unfavorable view, respectively, of the IRS, according to a July 2024 Pew Research survey.

The extras.

• One year ago today we released a bulletin of updates while we were off for Presidents Day.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was Executive Editor Isaac Saul’s piece in The Free Press.
• Nothing to do with politics: An Instagram channel dedicated to reviewing and glorifying sticks.
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,690 readers answered our survey on Trump’s talks with Russia and Ukraine with 79% disapproving. “Not involving Ukraine is short sighted and unhelpful for everyone,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

When Earl the donkey was rehomed after his previous owner passed away, he was lonely and depressed, even responding poorly to playdates with other animals. Then his new owner, Michelle, tried something new: She gave him a yoga ball. Earl lit up, and proceeded to throw the ball into the air and chase it. “The excitement was just pure joy for him,” Michelle said. Earl has since been spoiled with almost 40 yoga balls donated by social media users who saw his story. Even better, Earl has a few donkey friends who play ball with him. CTV News has the story (and the video).

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