DOGE hunts for ‘wins’ amid tensions with Trump administration, backlash

Facing weeks of negative headlines and growing pressure from within the Trump administration, the U.S. DOGE Service is racing to finish the first phase of its assignment — slashing the federal bureaucracy — and move on to what the team hopes will be seen as more constructive work: creating sleek tools for navigating government services.

Throughout DOGE, the need to find and champion positive achievements is seen as urgent, according to two people familiar with the group’s internal workings. One key ally, General Services Administration official and former Tesla employee Thomas Shedd, told his staff “I need wins to defend” during a meeting last week, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post.

Using a Silicon Valley phrase for putting new products in the hands of users, Shedd urged staff to “remain focused on the reason you came to the government and this team to begin with, which is to deliver value and ship.”

The effort comes as backstage turmoil over DOGE has begun to spill into public view: Only two days after praising billionaire Elon Musk, who oversees the DOGE team, in an address to Congress, President Donald Trump sided last week with frustrated agency heads, saying they — not Musk — are in charge of making cuts in their departments. On Truth Social, Trump called for more precision, writing that “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’” And in pro-Trump districts, voters have stormed town halls to protest DOGE cuts to government services and firings of thousands of civil servants.

The backlash is triggering a reckoning within DOGE, where some are coming to realize that history may not perceive their efforts kindly unless they can change the narrative.

“PR is viewed as a big mess internally right now,” said one of the people familiar with internal discussions at DOGE, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“I think everyone there knows they need to do a better job of telling the story,” the person said. “And that’s going to be a big component of the next phase of DOGE, leaning into storytelling and showing the wins and not having the story told for them.”

Chief among their plans: Using their tech expertise to build apps and websites to help federal workers and Americans trying to access government services, according to two people familiar with DOGE internal workings. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, a close friend of Musk’s who was responsible for the company’s inviting look, has been recruited to help lead the effort.

Even this has invited criticism, however. Musk has repeatedly criticized Social Security, one of the government’s most popular programs, and DOGE staff have been working inside the agency. But an effort to give the Social Security website and services a user-friendly digital overhaul was already underway at the U.S. Digital Service — until Musk pushed out the team working on it, according to Mina Hsiang, who led the USDS before the department became the U.S. DOGE Service in January.

“When you fire people who have deep understandings of the mission you want to accomplish, you’re sort of starting from zero,” she said.

Musk and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

“GSA is recommitting itself to its founding purpose: ensuring governmentwide efficiency and maximizing value for the American taxpayer,” said a GSA spokesperson. “As technology is an enabler for government efficiency and effectiveness, GSA has the critical products and technical talent to serve this purpose.”

Internally, DOGE staff are frustrated that a disconnect has emerged between what the public sees and the sense of mission that they bring to the job, the two people familiar with the group’s inner workings said. Many feel they are performing a public service, the people said. They wake up every day with a singular mission: To squeeze as much waste out of agency budgets as possible in a compressed timeline of mere months before their appointments as “special government employees” are set to end. Sometimes, they give federal workers only 10 minutes to complete a task.

Despite that, a growing portion of the public sees DOGE as callous and undisciplined, a narrative reinforced by news reports about fired military veterans, hourslong waits to file retirement claims and threatened benefits for 9/11 survivors. Almost 50% of Americans “disapprove” of Elon Musk’s work within the federal government, versus 34% that approve, according to a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

“The political reality is people want a positive story,” said one of the people, noting that it would take some time for cuts to deliver benefits. “There’s a chance you don’t get to that positive story.”

Though Musk has historically avoided public relations initiatives at his companies, preferring to use his X feed to communicate, DOGE has begun to dedicate itself to tangible wins. In recent days Musk has become intrigued by the idea of a “DOGE dividend” that would use a portion of the savings achieved through the group’s budget-cutting to send checks to American taxpayers, according to a person familiar with his thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, adding that Musk thinks it could give individual taxpayers an incentive to report wasteful spending.

On its website, DOGE lists a calculation of savings per taxpayer. That figure stood just above $650 late Thursday. That number may be an inflated estimate of DOGE’s overall cuts, and doling out checks would undercut its stated goal of reducing the government deficit.

“People can’t relate to $100 billion … but they can relate to their own paycheck,” said James Fishback, the CEO of investment firm Azoria, who developed the DOGE dividend idea. “‘Amount-saved-per-taxpayer’ is a powerful way to frame these savings so Americans can relate to them and support the important work DOGE is doing under President Trump’s leadership.”

DOGE is also focused on transforming digital services across the federal government by pairing designers with engineers to spin up projects within agencies. For example, in announcing his new role at DOGE, Gebbia posted a video on X created by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and DOGE showing a project to digitize the antiquated paper-based retirement process for federal workers in only one week. The video featured testimonials from delighted government bureaucrats praising the work. The project, a challenge Gebbia had given to the team as part of a quiet launch before his official announcement, represents the work he intends to do, one of the people said.

Meeting with his staff on Thursday, Musk ally Shedd said he would “withhold sugarcoating,” noting that the technologists’ effort was now in a “post ‘Fork’” chapter, referencing the controversial “Fork in the Road” email sent to hundreds of thousands of federal workers offering a deferred resignation package — echoing a prior missive Musk sent to Twitter employees.

“We are in the phase of reorganization and change,” he said, adding that the unit would halt any work that isn’t required, “critical,” or an administration or internal priority.

Shedd listed “recent wins” that demonstrated the type of work with recognizable effects the unit was looking for. Among them, a U.S. Digital Corps fellow “leading the first ever data-driven oversight of the U.S. organ transplant system to identify waste, fraud and abuse” and a cloud.gov team’s work to support artificial intelligence priorities.

Shedd emphasized the need to “ship,” a common refrain in tech companies, as well as “delivering value for the American taxpayer.”

“It’s important to call out that despite the craziness of the last several weeks that we’re still delivering and still shipping. And this is why we’re here,” he added.

Many of these tangible wins are expected to come from redesigning government technology, which DOGE staff view as shockingly outdated and error-ridden. Before DOGE, the White House’s U.S. Digital Service and 18F, a digital unit housed inside the GSA, also sought to recruit top-tier technologists from places like Meta, Palantir and Microsoft, to design government services more efficiently. One USDS member designed the ubiquitous four-colored tiles featured on Microsoft devices before joining government, according to a former USDS employee.

Projects undertaken by USDS over the years include revamping the Social Security website and call center, a mobile-friendly portal for veterans to make doctors appointments and a vaccine-finder tool. During the 2022 baby formula shortage, the group built a national database to quickly identify which areas had shortages, according to a former USDS employee.

Musk’s push has essentially eliminated both entities. Officials fired all of 18F this month and many employees of USDS have quit or been forced out. Like DOGE staff, USDS workers were motivated by a sense of mission, said several people familiar with the effort, but they often executed projects with little fanfare to avoid making the agencies look bad.

Hsiang noted that the government had determined that the ongoing effort to revamp the Social Security Administration’s website and public-facing services had saved $280 million and reduced phone call wait times by 70%. And they modernized the website and created a popular app for the Department of Veterans Affairs, allowing veterans to more easily file claims and check their benefits online.

“The easy things to talk about are the cute widgets, but over 10 years we revamped the entire process of interacting with the VA,” Hsiang said. “That’s one of a thousand things we did across the entire government.”

USDS was often slowed down by pushback from agency officials who did not understand the value of such technological expertise, two people said, as well as rules and restrictions that are key to protecting sensitive data. DOGE has been able to move faster, but only because it wields more political capital and ignores many of those safeguards.

When 18F worked on a project to launch a civil rights portal within the Justice Department, the team spent the most time figuring out how to securely and efficiently triage the complaints to the correct part of the DOJ without disclosing sensitive data, said one 18F employee, who is on administrative leave. Musk and his team, by contrast, have shown willingness to prioritize speed and coding skills, the person said.

“Anyone can make something look nice,” the employee said. But following the correct protocols to ensure government systems don’t break “is a lot more complicated. And I don’t think they care about it at all.”