(Washington) Three months after a resounding break between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the Doge commission, now deprived of the entrepreneur, continues to tremble, from the interior, the American administration. But far from the spotlight.
Ad hoc entity created by the President of the United States and entrusted to the boss of Tesla, the commission with government efficiency (DOGE) was to cut into public spending and lighten the bureaucracy.
Since its birth in January, nearly 200,000 civil servants have left the administration, according to the Partnership for Public Service organization, out of a total workforce of more than two million.
Many have been dismissed, often with the sole justification of cost savings, from tax inspectors to agents of national parks, including meteorologists from the NWS National Agency.
After the departure of Elon Musk, in May, most senior Doge officials also left the ship.
But some employees of the structure have entered the US government, while DOGE does not have the status of public organization.
“It is not because we no longer hear the refute of Elon Musk that they have disappeared,” warns a civil servant of the Defense Department, under the cover of anonymity.
The Commission is now headed by Amy Gleeson, a former nurse who has become a specialist in IT applied to the health system.
But according to several government employees interviewed by AFP, DOGE is under the control of Russell Vought, director of the White House Budget (OMB), a very influential body that articulates the budgetary guidelines of the President of the United States.
This lawyer by training, who presents himself as a breeder of the bureaucracy, is one of the architects of the “2025 project”, an ultra -conservative roadmap on which Donald Trump has taken care of since his investiture in January.
“Behind a curtain”
Several Allies of Elon Musk today hold extensive functions within the government, notably Scott Kupor.
Former partner in the reference of venture capital Andreessen Horowitz, he now heads the Office of Personnel Management, the Human Resources Management Antenna from the entire American government.
Brad Smith, investor in the medical field, joined the State Department, where he oversees international cooperation programs on the prevention of infectious diseases.
He had previously worked, under the Dogey label, to a brutal thinning cure of the department of health.
As for Aram Moghaddassi, it is the controllers of the IT services of American social security.
The data management manager of this service made a report saying that Aram Moghaddassi and his team had downloaded a gigantic social security database on an insufficiently protected server.
This dissemination within the American public sector complicates the evaluation of the influence that the movement driven by Elon Musk still exercises.
“The question of how we define Doge, what it is exactly, has become much more complex,” says Faith Williams, of the Project on Government Oversight observatory.
These developments are “extremely disturbing”, adds Cindy Cohn, executive director of the organization of protection of the rights of Internet users Electronic Frontier Foundation, insofar as Doge now works “behind a curtain”, far from looks.
Many organizations have denounced, from its creation, the lack of transparency and discernment of Doge, accused of cutting blindly in the workforce without prior analysis of the organizations.
In February, the Trump government had to recall employees of the Federal Nuclear Agency, the NNSA, in charge of management of the United States nuclear arsenal, after their expeditious dismissal by DOGE.
Alert launchers have also criticized the Commission for having sometimes acted at the limits of legality and of also exposing the personal data of millions of Americans.
“My feeling is that for each report of a whistleblower, there are many other problems that we know nothing,” proclaims Max Stier, CEO of Partnership for Public Service.
