Lambert here: Lengthy, worth a read. I’ve pulled out institutional nuggets here.
On a Thursday afternoon in early June, 12 staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency packed up their clothes and bedding from the sixth-floor of the General Services Administration headquarters where they had been sleeping since February, and looked for new homes.
[O]n the morning of June 5 something changed: Their figurehead, Elon Musk, had a falling-out with his patron, Donald Trump, that played out very publicly across the two men’s social media platforms.
The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.
Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area [of the nine-story GSA building] was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.
Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering.
Over the subsequent days and weeks, rival factions would compete for control of what Musk had built. Some sought to burrow deep inside the federal government and continue business as usual; others wanted to collaborate openly with the parts of government they previously eschewed. One of Musk’s chief lieutenants would openly defy White House orders to step down. At the same time, Musk was angling to lure remaining staffers to jobs at one of his private companies.
This account of the DOGE supernova, which left behind nebulous remnants throughout the government, is based on contemporaneous notes, photographs, correspondence and screenshots of Signal chats provided by participants in them.
The night after Musk’s farewell, senior DOGE figures who knew they wanted to stick around convened on a Signal call to discuss the future of their government modernization project. They grappled with what it would take for DOGE to survive. Could it be rebuilt into something new? And if so, under whose authority? How would it engage with other parts of government?
At the center of it all was Davis, who, as DOGE’s operational lead, acted as connective tissue for staffers embedded across agencies and their backchannel to the White House. Davis served as a special government employee, a status that enables individuals to cycle through federal posts for a 130-day period without fully abandoning their private-sector careers…. Davis called up agencies, demanding they grant engineers unfettered access to their data and systems. Once engineers were embedded in those agencies, often their only point of contact to DOGE was instructions or meeting invitations from Davis delivered through Signal, the team’s primary method of communication.
On May 31, after smiling with Trump for the cameras at an Oval Office farewell, Musk hosted his own private goodbye for DOGE team members in the august office suite he was about to vacate.
Musk instructed them to rethink how they went about their work, urging the next iteration of DOGE to be decentralized and to work with Cabinet secretaries to cut regulations and improve how the government functioned.
The most prominent governmental survivor of the Musk-era DOGE is Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb and former self-identified Democrat who says he voted for Trump in the 2024 election, describing himself as swayed by concerns about border security.
Gebbia remained popular both within DOGE and at the White House by staying focused on the popular effort to digitize the federal retirement system, and avoiding the factional conflicts that helped to split DOGE. In August, Trump elevated Gebbia to be U.S. chief design officer, sitting atop a newly created entity called the National Design Studio that advises agencies on websites on “usability and aesthetics.” (Gebbia did not respond to a request for comment.)
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