What Did Elon Musk Accomplish at DOGE?

I asked the former S.S.A. official, who had worked closely with several DOGE coders, what he thought of their abilities. “In general, they were all pretty talented for their level of experience,” he said. “If we’d taken them on as junior hires, they would probably have progressed pretty quickly in a hierarchical organization.” But, by design, they existed outside the civil service, with little guidance on what to do and why. “They all seemed pretty desperate for Elon to say that they were doing good,” the former official said. “There was a lot of ‘What does E. want?’ ‘Did you see what E. said?’ ” The former official compared the situation to the science-fiction novel “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card, in which a team of children who are invited by the military to play an elaborate video game are unknowingly operating actual weapons of war.

When I spoke with Lavingia, he reflected on what DOGE had actually achieved. It had been blamed for mass firings and contract cancellations across the government, but, in reality, it had played the role of technological adviser to politically appointed agency heads. “There’s a lot of power that comes in that first hundred days,” Lavingia said. “But DOGE and Elon really mostly had soft power—they didn’t have hard power.” The hard power had come from Trump; the soft power depended on Musk’s influence over him. “The premise of DOGE requires Elon and Trump to really be aligned,” Lavingia said. “And it now seems that was kind of for show.”