Top DOGE officials are already fleeing as Musk leaves government
Top officials at the Department of Government Efficiency are set to leave their roles following the departure of DOGE head Elon Musk.
Three officials – adviser Steve Davis, adviser and spokesperson Katie Miller, and attorney James Burnham – are leaving the administration, a White House official told The Hill.
Davis served in a leadership role at DOGE and has worked with Musk at several of his companies, including the Boring Company, SpaceX, and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Serving as DOGE's 'chief operating officer,' Davis spoke to Fox News in March, calling the work an 'inspiring mission' that was 'worth doing.'
Davis also appeared at a briefing alongside Musk at the White House with a small group of reporters, when Musk spoke about DOGE's work and its future.
Miller is the wife of Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller and was also part of the first Trump administration. She was named to the DOGE advisory board in December.
Burnham was DOGE's general counsel. He's also the president and founder of Vallecity Capital LLC and earlier served as a Supreme Court clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch.
On Wednesday night, Musk took to X to share his gratitude to President Donald Trump.
'As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,' he said. 'The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.'
Yet Musk earlier this week courted controversy as he slammed the large spending package put forward by Trump and congressional Republicans, which passed the House last week, and is currently expected to massively balloon the debt to $4 trillion even amid huge cuts in public services.
'I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,' the billionaire told CBS.
Both Musk and the other top officials at DOGE were limited by a 130-day restriction on their status as Special Government Employees. Musk has said that he will return full-time to his companies.
Musk is stepping down just after a former DOGE associate has said that he was removed after an interview in which he spoke about his work was published earlier this month.
Engineer and tech startup founder Sahil Lavingia wrote in a personal blog post that he 'got the boot' from DOGE the day after Fast Company published an interview with him. In the interview, he discussed finding fewer inefficiencies than he had expected. He was assigned as the senior adviser to the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Government Executive noted.
'I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,' Lavingia told Fast Company. The outlet noted that Lavingia noticed that there were plenty of mission-driven people working in the government.
'But honestly, it's kind of fine — because the government works. It's not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins,' he said.
Fiscal conservatives, meanwhile, are frustrated that the spending cuts put forward by DOGE aren't being codified, and worried about Trump's spending plan boosting expenditures.
'To see Republicans in Congress cast aside any meaningful spending reductions ... is demoralizing and represents a betrayal of the voters who elected them,' Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote on X.
Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on Wednesday: 'Personally I want to pass DOGE cuts every single week until the bloated out of control government is reigned back in. As a country, we cannot survive our national debt and honestly, we may be past the point of return. We should be aggressively attacking our debt and aggressively, cutting all waste fraud, and abuse and unnecessary programs.'
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