The Architecture of DOGE: Power Without Accountability Is Not Efficiency. It Is Its Opposite.

The question before us is not whether the federal government wastes money. It demonstrably does. The question is whether the architecture constructed to address that waste was itself structurally sound — whether it was built with the mechanisms of accountability, transparency, and legitimate authority that any body exercising consequential power over the lives of millions of people is obligated to possess. We find that it was not.

I. The Architecture As Constructed

On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order renaming the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service and granting it expansive new powers. No congressional authorisation accompanied this order. No legislation defined DOGE’s scope, authority, or limits. The entity was created by executive fiat alone.

Elon Musk, designated a “special government employee” — a classification created by Congress in 1962 for individuals performing limited duties for no more than 130 days — was widely identified as the driving force behind DOGE from the outset. This designation was never constitutionally tested before his appointment. It has since generated no fewer than seventeen significant legal challenges across federal courts.

The constitutional question is specific and serious. The Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution requires that officers of the United States — those exercising significant authority pursuant to the laws of the Union — be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, or appointed through a process explicitly authorised by Congress. Fourteen state attorneys general argued in February 2025 that Musk was acting as a principal officer while holding a designation that required no such confirmation. Federal District Judge Tanya Chutkan, denying a motion to dismiss that lawsuit, wrote that the states had legitimately called into question what she described as “the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”

That phrase — unchecked authority of an entity over which Congress has no oversight — is not a political characterisation. It is a structural description. It is the precise definition of an accountability gap. And it was written by a federal judge reviewing the entity’s own legal filings.

II. The Data Architecture

DOGE personnel obtained administrative access to the information systems of multiple federal agencies. The specific systems accessed include the Social Security Administration’s records database — which contains the personal and financial data of over 300 million Americans — the IRS Integrated Data Retrieval System, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service database, and personnel management systems across at least a dozen agencies.

In August 2025, SSA whistleblower and former Chief Data Officer Charles Borges filed a formal complaint alleging that DOGE associates uploaded Numident data — the foundational identity record linking every American’s Social Security number to their biographical information — to a custom cloud environment that he described as “vulnerable.” The complaint further alleged that a DOGE member placed this data on a personal thumb drive with the stated intent of using it at a subsequent private employer.

In January 2026, the Department of Justice filed a court document disclosing that two named DOGE employees at the SSA had been referred to the Office of Special Counsel for potential Hatch Act violations. The same filing disclosed that these employees had communicated with an external political advocacy group whose stated aim was, in the DOJ’s own words, “to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” One of these employees signed a formal “Voter Data Agreement” with that group in his capacity as an SSA employee on March 24, 2025.

The SSA disclosed in the same filing that this agreement was not reviewed or approved through the agency’s data exchange procedures. It was not reviewed or approved through any procedure. The SSA itself stated it could not verify the extent of the data violations. The government cannot account for what happened to the data of 300 million Americans. It has said so formally, in court.

On March 10, 2026 — two days before this ruling — the Washington Post reported that the SSA Inspector General’s office had opened a formal investigation into the allegation that a former DOGE engineer removed sensitive data on a personal storage device. That investigation is ongoing at the time of publication.

III. The Savings Architecture

DOGE’s central justification was fiscal. The argument for tolerating its structural irregularities was that the savings it would produce were consequential enough to warrant the departure from established accountability norms. We examine that argument on its own terms.

Elon Musk pledged at least two trillion dollars in annual savings in 2024. That figure was revised to one trillion dollars in early 2025, then to $150 billion in April 2025. House DOGE caucus leader Blake Moore acknowledged in June 2025 that Republican members “always knew it was a massive exaggeration.” By year’s end, the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project — tracking federal outlays in real time — recorded total government spending of $7.558 trillion, compared to $7.135 trillion the previous year. A 5.8% increase. Mandatory spending, which DOGE was structurally prohibited from touching without congressional action, drove the increase.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian research organisation with no institutional interest in inflating DOGE’s failures, concluded that DOGE “had no noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending.” Independent analysis cited by the Congressional Research Service estimated DOGE’s actual net impact on the deficit at approximately negative $21.7 billion — meaning it cost more than it saved when downstream effects are incorporated. A separate analysis estimated $135 billion in taxpayer costs from DOGE-driven disruptions. The IRS projected revenue losses exceeding $500 billion attributable to DOGE-related workforce reductions at the agency responsible for collecting federal revenue.

DOGE’s own published accounting — its “wall of receipts” — was reviewed by PolitiFact, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute. All four found material errors, double-counting, and inflated figures. The AEI analyst concluded the receipts showed an “appetite for recklessness” and provided “ample grounds for scepticism.” Some line items showed savings of zero dollars. Others showed negative values attributed to input errors that remained on the site uncorrected for weeks after being identified.

The entity charged with holding federal spending accountable to the American people could not itself account for its own numbers. The institution designed to impose rigour on government operated without rigour. The body demanding transparency from federal agencies refused disclosure of its own records — successfully petitioning the Supreme Court in June 2025 to block FOIA requests for internal DOGE documents.

IV. The Workforce Architecture

DOGE’s most measurable achievement was the reduction of the federal civilian workforce from approximately 3.015 million employees in January 2025 to 2.744 million by November — a reduction of 271,000 positions, representing the largest peacetime workforce reduction on record. This is a structural fact and we record it as such.

What the historical record does not support is the claim that this reduction was executed with any coherent framework for identifying which reductions were sound and which were not. DOGE terminated contracts and grants that were subsequently found, on review, to have been mischaracterised. It cut positions at the IRS — the agency responsible for collecting federal revenue — contributing to the projected revenue losses cited above. It accelerated the dismantling of USAID, which a federal district judge found likely unconstitutional before a circuit court stayed that ruling on narrow procedural grounds. Professor Brooke Nichols of Boston University estimated that DOGE cuts to foreign aid programmes had contributed to approximately 300,000 deaths by May 2025, predominantly among children, as health and humanitarian supply chains dependent on those programmes collapsed.

We note that projection is contested. We record it because no comparable institution has attempted to formally examine it. The absence of a published methodology for DOGE’s decisions means no independent body can determine which cuts were structurally justified and which were not. That determination is impossible to make. That impossibility is itself the structural failure.

V. The Accountability Architecture

The structural question at the centre of this ruling is not whether government should be more efficient. That question has a clear answer. It is whether an entity exercising the powers DOGE exercised — terminating agencies, accessing the most sensitive data systems in the federal government, eliminating hundreds of thousands of positions — can do so without a published decision framework, without Senate confirmation of its leadership, without FOIA obligations, without congressional oversight, and without the capacity to account for its own claimed results.

We find that it cannot. Not because the goals were illegitimate. Because power exercised without accountability is not governance. It is its negation. The founding principle of every democratic accountability structure is that consequential authority must be traceable — to a specific person, acting under a specific grant of authority, within a specific framework of oversight. DOGE was traceable to none of these things with any consistency. Its leadership was defined differently in different courts. Its authority was described differently by different administration officials. Its records were shielded from disclosure by the Supreme Court itself.

An institution that cannot be examined cannot be held to account. An institution that cannot be held to account cannot be trusted with power. An institution that cannot be trusted with power should not have been granted it — regardless of the intentions of those who granted it, and regardless of the goals it claimed to pursue.

The finding is Unsound. Not because government efficiency is an illegitimate objective. Not because every decision DOGE made was wrong. Because the architecture constructed to pursue that objective lacked, from its first day of operation, the accountability mechanisms that any institution exercising consequential authority over the lives of millions of people is obligated to possess. The savings were not delivered. The data protections were violated. The legal authority was never established. The records remain sealed. The investigations are ongoing. The architecture failed — structurally, demonstrably, and on its own terms.

The Dissent to this ruling appears in this issue. It argues that DOGE’s structural failures must be weighed against the structural failures of the institutions it was designed to replace — and that the standard applied here, if applied consistently, would condemn most of the federal government itself. We recommend reading it.