Elon Musk is stepping back from the federal government but his so-called Department of Government Efficiency isn’t going anywhere.

Just this week at the Interior Department, a 30-year veteran of the agency who told employees to ignore DOGE directives was escorted out of the building. Elsewhere, some DOGE employees have been hired on as permanent government staffers and given high-ranking positions inside agencies. The General Services Administration, for example, is an entry point for dozens of DOGE officials who’ve then gone to other departments.

And Cabinet heads like Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought have been quietly prepping plans for lasting changes that stand to be even more consequential than the initial rounds of cuts from Musk’s team, including through President Donald Trump’s large-scale efforts to reduce the workforce and the president’s budget requests.

“DOGE is at work. They’re not going away,” Vought told Fox News recently. “I talk to them every single day.”

Similarly, a White House official granted anonymity to discuss the situation emphasized to POLITICO that the “true DNA of DOGE” is within the agencies where DOGE staff are political appointees who can stay for as long as they want.

DOGE and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

With Musk’s 130-day “special government employee” status expiring, he made his exit official Wednesday night in a post on his social media platform X. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk posted.

“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” he said.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, chimed in to say that DOGE’s work to eliminate “the rot embedded deep within Washington” has “only just begun.”

Now, the Trump administration’s controversial and at-times chaotic attempt to reshape the federal government is entering a new phase. Gone is the shock and awe of the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency and DOGE’s initial gutting of the federal workforce, in which tens of thousands of workers have been fired, placed on leave or left their jobs and federal budgets have been slashed. That’s on top of gutting key agencies across the government, including the IRS and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Instead, DOGE staffers are continuing to find quieter ways to cut programs and staffing and are at times trying to access lesser-known institutions and departments even as they fight with courts over charges they want to implement. During the last two weeks, DOGE has tried to access the Government Publishing Office, the government’s central publishing operation, as well as the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights, which manages discrimination and harassment complaints in Congress. That’s on top of sending — or trying to send — teams to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Government Accountability Office.

Some members of the DOGE operation are expected to continue their government-cutting roles inside agencies, while others who signed on to be DOGE’s “small-government revolutionaries” are expected to leave their temporary gigs and head back to the corporate world.

Cabinet secretaries and department leaders are also publicly asserting their own control to make cuts as they ask lawmakers to endorse smaller budgets and pledging to be more efficient with less funding. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer recently successfully pressured GSA to reverse dozens of office lease cancellations that DOGE had previously targeted. And Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin has downplayed the role DOGE is playing inside his agency as he pursues spending and workforce cuts.

“All decisions are made by me in the agency,” Zeldin told senators during a congressional hearing last week when pressed about plans to cut that agency’s stand-alone science office.

DOGE inside agencies

To understand how deeply DOGE has burrowed into the federal government, look at the Interior Department.

A few weeks into the new administration, DOGE official Tyler Hassen assembled a meeting of the department’s senior career executives in the Interior secretary’s conference room on the fifth floor at its headquarters. Dozens of career employees were in the room; many more tuned in virtually.

Hassen introduced himself to the career staffers, explaining that his role was to make the department and the government more efficient. He told the staff he thought there was a lot of waste at Interior that could be cleaned up, according to a person who participated in the meeting.

Hassen delivered the speech from his office on the building’s sixth floor, the person said. “He didn’t even come down. He was one floor above us. That was kind of weird,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss an internal meeting.

By early March, Hassen had been given a senior appointment on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s team as acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget. The move to give Hassen expansive authorities and a formal title on Interior’s senior team sparked an outcry from critics who have accused Burgum of ceding his power to DOGE.

An Interior Department spokesperson, in an email to POLITICO, criticized the “leak” about Hassan and defended him, saying, “Tyler Hassen is doing great work at Interior making sure we are following President Trump’s directive to make government more efficient for American taxpayers.”

Hassen did not respond to a request for comment.

Hassen isn’t the only DOGE team member inside the Interior Department. A former SpaceX software engineer recently took over as Interior’s top information technology official in the wake of a dispute between the department’s IT officials and the DOGE team. The Interior Department also named Stephanie Holmes as its chief human capital officer. She had reportedly been DOGE’s human resources expert.

Holmes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s not isolated to Interior. More broadly, Musk still meets with Trump and this month traveled with the president to Qatar, where the tech billionaire also announced that he was stepping back from funding political campaigns. At the same time, top DOGE figures like Steve Davis, described by The New York Times as Musk’s “top lieutenant,” and Antonio Gracias, a billionaire investor and top Musk ally, come to the White House once or twice a week to meet with officials like chief of staff Susie Wiles or deputy chief of staff Miller, according to a White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

After the story was published, the White House sent a statement to POLITICO saying that DOGE remains an “integral” part of the federal government and will continue its work “under the direction of agency and department heads in the Trump administration.”

At the same time, Vought has stepped in as the de facto power broker in Washington in trying to get DOGE’s work codified into the law and working with agencies to carry out the remaining reductions in force, according to two other administration officials granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Vought, for example, put together the White House budget proposal reflecting DOGE’s $160 billion in cuts, and is in constant contact with Hill appropriators as well as Republicans who have had reservations about DOGE’s cuts.

“Everyone’s more nervous about [Vought] than Elon actually, especially because he knows government a little bit better,” said a federal government worker granted anonymity because they feared retribution. “While people are excited that Elon is gone, this doesn’t change much.”

Vought declined to comment for this report.

Agencies push back

In recent weeks, some agency leaders have also publicly broken with DOGE directives, a phenomenon that could become more widespread as Musk reduces his role.

In April, leaders of the National Institutes of Health rolled back DOGE directives that instructed staffers to send weekly emails outlining their productivity and limited purchases and travel on company cards, according to messages obtained by POLITICO. That’s partly because the data DOGE collected would have been expensive to store, and it was unclear if Musk’s office ever used it for anything consequential.

That prompted some staffers to suspect the agency’s recently confirmed director, Jay Bhattacharya, and perhaps others at the Department of Health and Human Services, were willing to break with Musk and DOGE.

“I’ve tried my hardest to turn the lights back on. … I heard you guys had to do five points every week. That was ridiculous. I’m really proud that we don’t have to have some of the best scientists in the world tell me what they did last week,” Bhattacharya said at a town hall last week.

He also portrayed himself as powerless against DOGE’s mass workforce terminations because they landed the same day he joined the agency in April, though he said he would reinstate some procurement staffers who shouldn’t have been terminated.

But the movement at NIH and other HHS offices weeks after illustrates a more complicated portrait.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, at least six DOGE officials have descended at the agency with NIH credentials, and some have slashed scientific research grants and conducted staff reorganizations, terminations and other purported cost-cutting measures, according to an NIH staffer familiar with the matter granted anonymity out of concerns they would face a retribution. Bhattacharya and other HHS leaders have done little to stave off these deeper cuts, the NIH staffer, as well as another institute staffer who was also granted anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “strongly supports DOGE’s mission and views the team as a critical partner in restoring public trust in our health institutions,” said Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson. “Cutting waste, fraud and abuse at HHS remains a top priority.”

In July, NIH is expected to turn in plans to dramatically consolidate the NIH’s information technology departments, in which there are over a dozen teams in various sub-offices, even as it remains unclear how much work contractors can backfill, the staffers said. Bhattacharya contended at the town hall cuts like this would eliminate redundant offices, while some staffers said it could imperil logistics support for scientists.

Now employees have been charged to essentially fire each other by putting forward plans to slash the IT departments down to size, said the two staffers.

“DOGE is still hungry,” one of the NIH staffers said. “We’ve still got to feed the f–ing dog.”

Ben Lefebvre and Nick Niedzwiadek contributed to this report.