For six months, any General Services Administration employee who wanted to enter the epicenter of Elon Musk’s DOGE on the sixth floor of the agency’s headquarters had to pass an armed guard who checked names against a pre-approved list,
Politico reports.
Now, the guard is gone. So are the signs in the elevator next to sixth floor buttons reading “Authorized Access Only.”
It’s emblematic of DOGE’s retreat from the center of the Trump administration’s orbit. The once-feared crew that barged into offices and slashed jobs at an unprecedented pace is a shell of its former self, owing to departures, lawsuits, bureaucratic roadblocks and, crucially, the loss of its chainsawer-in-chief: Musk.
At least eight of the core original DOGE staffers have left government, according to internal records reviewed by POLITICO and sources familiar with the matter granted anonymity to discuss it.
That list includes: Steve Davis, who operationally led DOGE; Nicole Hollander, who led the effort to shrink the government’s footprint and is married to Davis; Brad Smith, who led the DOGE team at HHS that made sweeping cuts; Chris Stanley, a Musk aide who helped install Starlink satellites on the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building; Katie Miller, DOGE’s communications director; Amanda Scales, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and early gatekeeper for firing exemptions; DOGE’s chief counsel James Burnham, who appears to have resumed his private practice at King Street Legal and Vallecito Capital based on updated firm bios; and Tom Krause, who served as fiscal assistant secretary of the Treasury.
A senior White House official, granted anonymity to describe the employees, explained the departures by pointing to the fact that many DOGE staffers were special government employees, a designation that has a required end date.
“It was never the plan for the highest levels of DOGE officials to make a career out of the government,” the official said.
