Cutting crew Is the chaos unleashed by Musk's Doge on the wane?

"This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!" screamed Elon Musk, wielding the power tool before a cheering crowd at a rightwing political conference. The tech titan promised to slice and dice the US federal government and save taxpayers a trillion dollars. Oozing confidence, the world's richest person seemed unstoppable.

- By David Smith WASHINGTON

That was February. Last week Musk announced that he is hanging up his chainsaw and stepping back from his role overseeing the unofficial "department of government efficiency", or Doge, to focus on Tesla, his beleaguered electric vehicle company.

It is possible that the relative lull in the chaos unleashed by Doge presages a new, more dangerous phase. CNN has reported that Doge is building a master database to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants by combining data from across the federal government.

Doge was created by an executive order that Trump signed on 20 January to “modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”. But its mandate - due to expire on 4 July 2026 - soon broadened as its staffers swept through government departments looking for spending and staff cuts.

The Doge team is small, with about 79 appointed employees and 10 employees seconded from other agencies. Many of the staffers are young software engineers who are current and former employees in Musk companies, with little to no experience inside the government.