Hundreds protest mass firing of NOAA employees from DOGE cuts
Hundreds gathered to protest mass layoffs at the US weather forecasting agency.
WASHINGTON ― As departments across the federal government in the Trump administration rapidly downsize their workforces, one office keeps getting bigger.
Top White House adviser Elon Musk said the Department of Government Efficiency that he oversees has expanded to “pretty much” every department and is set to grow to about 200 employees, up from about 100 federal workers who currently work for DOGE.
“We’re a little bit over 100 at this point,” Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said in an interview Monday on Fox News with Larry Kudrow. “We’re going to get to 200.”
With guidance from Musk, the richest man in the world, DOGE has worked aggressively to gut the federal bureaucracy since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Heads of federal departments have until Thursday under a Trump order to initiate “large-scale reductions of force” as part a more aggressive phase of workforce cuts that go beyond recently hired or promoted probationary workers targeted to date.
Although Musk ‒ who is considered a “special government employee” ‒ does not receive a federal government salary, DOGE employees are paid. Some are earning six-figure federal salaries, according to a recent report from WIRED.
Musk calls entitlement spending ‘the big one to eliminate’
The DOGE team, headquartered at the White House campus with Amy Gleason as top administrator, includes computer and software engineers, information technology experts and financial analysts. Musk is not considered a DOGE employee, the White House has said, even though he oversees DOGE’s work.
Musk said he believes DOGE is on track of meeting its goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal government by the start of the next fiscal year at the end of September. “Unless we’re stopped, we will get to a trillion of savings,” Musk said.
But he pointed to government “entitlements” as the biggest barrier. In 2024, Social Security and health care spending (including Medicare and Medicaid) made up 45% of the overall federal budget, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending ‒ which most of the federal spending is entitlements ‒ that’s like the big one to eliminate,” Musk said. “That’s the, sort of, half trillion, maybe $600 or $700 billion a year.”
Trump has vowed repeatedly that he won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in spending cuts. “I’m not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,” Trump said in a Sunday interview on Fox News, adding: “Now, we’re going to get fraud out of there.”
Musk also suggested his work with DOGE has taken a toll on his business ventures. “With great difficulty,” Musk told Kudlow when asked how he is operating his businesses while overseeing DOGE.
His remarks came as Tesla’s stock dropped by about 15% Monday amid a stock market plunge, marking the electric vehicle’s worst day on the market since 2020.
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
