'DOGE' formally established under White House

CQ Roll Call Staff, CQ-Roll Call on Jan 21, 2025

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WASHINGTON — It’s official: There’s now a Department of Government Efficiency and it reports directly up to Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.

Trump late Monday issued an executive order — one of many Day 1 executive actions — formally establishing DOGE as an agency housed within the Executive Office of the President.

The executive order in some ways upends the notion that DOGE would be nothing more than an unofficial advisory board with no formal role in the federal government.

The group’s advertised streamlining and cost-cutting role would still be temporary, and actual policy decisions would have to be made by Congress, the agencies and higher-ups in the White House. Nonetheless, housing the agency within an existing federal office could help deflect legal challenges that DOGE, as a private entity, was not abiding by federal transparency rules.

Several suits filed Monday within minutes of Trump’s inauguration claim that under a 1972 law governing federal advisory committees, DOGE meetings and records should be available to the public and that the group’s members should represent a “fair balance in viewpoints.”

Instead of operating as an outside agency, DOGE is replacing the old U.S. Digital Service, a part of the Office of Management and Budget that President Barack Obama established in August 2014, staffed by information technology experts that helped fix initial glitches in rolling out the 2010 health care law’s exchange portal, HealthCare.gov.

The new DOGE appears to be keeping some of the old Digital Service’s mission, which is to “deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design,” according to its website. Trump’s executive order says the agency’s job will be to help implement his agenda by “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

But the similarities are likely to stop there for the new agency, which is keeping the “USDS” initials but is now officially called the “United States DOGE Service,” Trump’s order says.

Part of the agency’s mandate will be to improve government-wide IT capabilities, though it’s also expected to coordinate with other federal agency heads to “ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.”

While protection of sensitive data will be a priority, the order says, the data-sharing requirement could give DOGE operatives access to a deep look under the hood at what agencies are doing with taxpayer dollars. That could help ease DOGE officials’ job as they look for cost savings to recommend to lawmakers and top Trump budget officials.

The order creates a role for a “USDS Administrator” who will report to the White House chief of staff; even though the administrator won’t report to the OMB director, the two are expected to work closely. It wasn’t immediately clear whether that person would be Elon Musk, the remaining leader of the previously unofficial DOGE after Monday’s departure of Vivek Ramaswamy.

Within the new agency a “U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization” would be created — using authorities granted nearly 25 years ago — that would sunset on July 4, 2026, the same date the original, unofficial DOGE was scheduled to expire. A 2000 law allows for creation of a temporary “commission, committee, board, or other organization … for a specific period not in excess of three years for the purpose of performing a specific study or other project.”

The order requires each agency leader to designate four employees, which may include temporary consultants known as “Special Government Employees,” to work with DOGE.