DOGE’s millions: As Musk and Trump gut government, their ax-cutting agency gets cash infusion

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20 February

Elon Musk attends a FII Priority Saudi Investment summit in Miami, Florida, U.S., February 19, 2025.

While Elon Musk and his underlings demand budget cuts and layoffs across the federal government, funding for their agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — has soared to nearly $40 million, ProPublica found in a review of Office of Management and Budget records.

Billionaire investor Musk has called DOGE “maximally transparent.” President Donald Trump has said that some 100 people work for the group, but his administration has refused to make information about DOGE’s spending and operations public. In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of DOGE’s inner workings, ProPublica has gathered the names and backgrounds of the people employed there. We’ve identified some 46 people, including 12 new names we are adding to the list today.

Trump and Musk have defended DOGE as a tool for trimming fat from what they see as a bloated bureaucracy. The effects of those cuts have proved crippling, bringing a halt to programs that provided essential services to vulnerable populations across the country and the world.

The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told ProPublica she didn’t believe DOGE had the legal authority for the actions it’s taken. She called it a “made-up federal department” that’s wasting taxpayer dollars.

“This unlawful effort is stealing federal funds from American families and businesses,” DeLauro said.

Most of DOGE’s money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority.

The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE’s staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were.

The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then DOGE’s tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned, some contend.

“The administration can’t have it both ways,” said Adam Grogg, a former deputy general counsel at OMB and now the legal director at Governing for Impact, a left-of-center think tank. “Either it’s an agency covered by FOIA with the authority to do what it’s doing, or it’s purely advising the president and can’t be directing agencies in the way it now is.”

A federal judge presiding over one of the many DOGE-related lawsuits also recently grilled the administration’s lawyers about its conflicting stances. In a recent hearing, U.S. District Judge John Bates characterized the government’s position as “we’re not an agency where we don’t want to be an agency, but we are an agency this one instance where we want to be.”

ProPublica has confirmed the names of 12 additional government staffers who are either part of DOGE or are linked to Musk’s constellation of companies and have roles in the new administration. We confirmed the names by cross-referencing agency records, speaking with dozens of sources inside the federal government, and poring through documents from ongoing litigation challenging DOGE’s authority.

They are spread across agencies. At the Department of Education, DOGE staffers are exploring how to expand the agency’s reliance on AI to both identify potential waste and interact with student loan recipients. At the EPA, they have reportedly gained access to contracting databases. Some staffers serve in executive-level roles while others have ambiguous titles, such as “senior adviser,” leaving unclear the nature of their work.

One of the names newly added to the tracker, Katherine Armstrong Loving, is the sibling of crypto executive Brian Armstrong, who runs the industry leader Coinbase. Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Armstrong met with Trump to discuss appointments to administration posts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Some employees work at more than one agency. None responded to requests for comment.

While Musk has celebrated DOGE’s cuts and disparaged targeted agencies, Trump officials now say he’s not actually running it.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Funding Floodgates

The Trump administration began funding DOGE soon after it took office. It started by tapping $750,000 from a White House fund for information technology initiatives in late January.

Since then, the funding has ballooned; the most recent apportionment came on Feb. 8 and included a $14 million chunk described as part of a “software modernization initiative.” In all, ProPublica found, more than $39 million has been earmarked to DOGE in the Trump administration’s first month.

For perspective, in recent years Congress had allocated around $50 million a year for the IT modernization initiative that DOGE supplanted, budget records show.

The Trump administration has not yet released enough details to trace the exact source of the funding flowing into DOGE or said who is being paid. The money could be coming from agency budgets that have money set aside for IT upgrades or other services. It’s also not yet clear what timeframe the allocation covers or whether it has funded salaries.

Funding one agency from another’s budget is not unusual, experts say. But money cannot be moved around for whatever purpose the White House wants — it is restricted by something called the “purpose statute,” which requires funds to pay for items Congress has specifically prescribed.

DOGE’s operating method “leaves questions about possible violations of the purpose statute,” said Christie Wentworth with the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “If DOGE uses funds that are available only for IT-related purposes for initiatives that have nothing to do with IT, that use could violate federal law.”

Brett Murphy, Kirsten Berg, Pratheek Rebala and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.

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