Kevin Lamarque/CNP/Zuma

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency he had promised after winning the 2024 election.

Watchdog groups were ready to challenge DOGE from the start under the assumption it would fall under the legal rules governing outside government advisory groups. Indeed, within minutes of Trump’s swearing in, four such lawsuits were filed against it.

“This is an entity that is operating in secrecy.”

But in an apparent attempt to dodge the rules, Trump’s order, instead of creating an outside government advisory group, officially set up DOGE as part of the Executive Office of the President. On paper, its mission was pared down, from massive cuts to government to improving IT efficiency. Did the president and his co-conspirator Elon Musk have a change of heart—or is something else going on?

Since November, DOGE had acted as an off-the-books committee lead by Musk and another MAGA-aligned billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. It was already contacting federal agencies and, according to reports, communicating via Signal, an encrypted app with a built in auto-deletion feature that violates federal record-keeping laws.

If DOGE is an outside committee, their work—originally described as drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce and finding up to $2 trillion in spending cuts—must comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), the lawsuits alleged, a 1972 law intended to bring transparency and balance to such committees. One such suit filed by watchdog groups and veterans and teachers organizations called DOGE “a shadow operation,” and argued its “unchecked secrecy, access, and private influence—bought by political........

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