The News
As uncertainty shrouds the identity of the formal chief of the Department of Government Efficiency, Semafor is told the position remains vacant.
DOGE was created as a rebrand of the United States Digital Service at the start of the Trump administration, and the previous administrator of the digital service, Mina Hsiang, stepped down when Trump took office in January. The lack of a publicly named successor is creating confusion as the Trump administration argues in court that Elon Musk, despite his frequent identification as a DOGE leader, plays no formal role in its efforts to slash the size and scope of government.
Asked if there is a single person running DOGE, which has established footholds in multiple federal agencies and sought access to sensitive government payment systems, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., replied: “Not that I’m aware of.”
“In each agency, it’s probably some of the staff that are in there, in combination with some of the temporary employees that are there as advisers,” Tillis said when asked who’s in charge at DOGE. He said Republicans had corresponded a few weeks ago with both Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, named as a co-head of DOGE before he left ahead of a gubernatorial run.
While Musk is the face of DOGE, answering questions in the Oval Office about its efforts just last week, the Trump administration contends that he’s doing so as an adviser to the president rather than a formal member of the group. That distinction may not stand up to legal scrutiny in multiple lawsuits filed in response to DOGE’s work, but the White House stood by it on Tuesday as they remained vague about who is running the work that’s so closely been linked to the world’s richest person.
While Semafor was told of the vacancy at Hsiang’s position, it’s possible that the administration took the highly unusual step of naming a DOGE chief but not sharing his or her name widely in the administration. The Congressional Research Service noted in a report published Feb. 6 that it “is not aware that a USDS administrator has been named publicly.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday that DOGE workers are “onboarding as political appointees at every respective agency” and are working alongside secretaries at each agency to identify “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Leavitt added that DOGE “does not have statutory authority,” but rather is advising each agency on cuts to hiring, contracts and beyond. When asked who, specifically, the administrator of DOGE is, Leavitt did not offer a clear answer.
The executive order Trump signed on Inauguration Day to formally create DOGE noted that its administrator would be “established in the Executive Office of the President [and] report to the White House Chief of Staff.” It did not name a specific person.
A White House official declined to comment.
Know More
The confusion over who technically runs DOGE began Monday, when White House official Joshua Fisher noted in a declaration to a judge that Elon Musk “is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator,” nor is he “an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN on Tuesday that DOGE reports to the Executive Office of the President, which then reports to Trump himself — but Trump, he said, is not the administrator of the department.
Lawmakers themselves also seem confused about who is running DOGE. Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., both told Semafor they thought Musk was calling the shots.
“I can’t tell you one specific person” who’s running it, said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont. “I know they’ve got a great team. I can’t give you the org chart right now in terms of the structure. I like the output, though.”
After Hsiang resigned at the Digital Service ahead of its restyling as DOGE, Ted Carstensen became its remaining top-ranking leader, then resigned in February, according to Wired; it also reported that a current employee said there was “no correspondence so far as to who the head of this organization was” as of Tuesday.
The View From A Former OMB Official
Stuart Shapiro, a professor at Rutgers University who worked in the Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said not having a figurehead atop DOGE “doesn’t matter a ton” because the office “is still kind of a made-up entity.”
But, Shapiro said, it does allow the Trump administration to avoid legal, public, and congressional scrutiny.
“This feels to me very much like they are playing rope-a-dope with the courts a little bit,” he said. “They are saying, ‘oh, well, no, you can’t bring that person in to testify because they’re not the head of DOGE.’”
“What that does is it strings things out and allows them to continue to wreak havoc within the executive branch,” he added.
Shelby and Burgess’ View
DOGE’s move-fast-and-break-things approach to the government prompted a number of lawsuits, and Musk probably isn’t willing to sit in court or open himself up to legal proceedings. By clarifying that he’s not actually running DOGE — even as he’s focused on it in his position assisting Trump and posting about it nonstop — the White House might be hoping to solve that problem.
It’s not clear, though, that the arcane legal reliance on the official DOGE administrator will shield Musk from legal and political challenges stemming from its work. Not to mention that Musk’s penchant for posting as well as attracting attention means it will be hard to remove him from the center of conversations around the firings, contract cancellations and other DOGE work.
Morgan Chalfant contributed to this report.