On Monday, June 23, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the first young, inexperienced technologists to join Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), disappeared from the internal directory of the General Services Administration (GSA).
But later that week, Coristine was back. This time he was at the Social Security Administration (SSA), working alongside another known DOGE member, Aram Moghaddassi.
Coristine’s disappearance from government—and sudden reappearance in it—is emblematic of DOGE 2.0, a new iteration of the organization that, post-Musk’s formal participation, is still very much present and continuing its wholesale assault on federal agencies. But without flashy leadership, DOGE technologists are now quietly cycling into federal agencies, spending days or weeks building products and cutting contracts before cycling out once again. This is all done with little oversight from the White House or the United States DOGE Service (USDS), which these technologists purportedly represent.
Legacy federal workers [(!!) —lambert] in agencies across the government have been told that the DOGE affiliates are their coworkers, operating as agency employees, not part of a separate organization.
“We used to say things like ‘DOGE wants to review X, Y, Z.’ But now our boss says not to call them DOGE anymore,” one US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employee says. At the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), another federal employee told WIRED that DOGE is now being referred to as “The USDA Digital Service.”
Sahil Lavingia, a former DOGE member previously identified by WIRED and stationed at the VA, claims that [Steve] Davis hasn’t fully broken with DOGE. “I’ve just heard that he’s still involved, he’s still meeting folks and trying to push forward the DOGE agenda,” he says. Another government source, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, says they’ve heard DOGE representatives have on occasion been speaking with Davis through Signal after his supposed departure.
“All it takes is people taking you seriously for you to be there,” says Lavingia. “The whole operation has always been done on Signal, so nothing actually has to change about that operationally for him to continue telling people what to do, getting reports, et cetera …You don’t need a government laptop or email or anything like that to tell people what to do.”
“The executive order of creating DOGE and structuring that so that it has a presence in every agency remains in place. So it is a tool that can be used even when Musk is not around,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
During a House Appropriations Committee meeting in June, Russell Vought, the current Office of Management and Budget director, reassured lawmakers that DOGE would not end with Musk’s departure. He described DOGE’s new leadership structure as “much more decentralized” and said that the group’s members would become “far more institutionalized” within the agencies where they work. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Vought would continue to implement DOGE-affiliated cuts once Musk left government.
According to Lavingia, the DOGE teams were already highly decentralized, with little interaction or feedback across different agencies. “You think you’re joining the group, but you’re really joining a subgroup of a subgroup of the group, and if you go all the way to the top there’s like two people there,” he says.
Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University, says that he does “see the lines blurring” between DOGE and the rest of the federal government. “Trump was greatly aided by the fact that he could disassociate himself from Musk as Musk became increasingly unpopular with the public. And so Musk was a very useful tool” for both implementing and absorbing the public displeasure caused by some parts of the administration’s agenda.
“DOGE is not like any other entity we’ve seen with the federal government. Its structure and its mode of operation were really unprecedented,” says Moynihan. “I do think that it is like this period of real uncertainty. It by itself is not going to disappear, but it is going to iterate into something different.”
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