Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, may be stepping away from his role in the Trump administration, but his influence on the government is likely to persist long after he leaves.
Musk has built a network of allies within the bureaucracy, including dozens of long-term political appointees and influential chief information officers at powerful agencies. These individuals are embedded in positions that will last beyond Musk’s departure.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was formed under Musk’s leadership, is planning to centralize core administrative functions across agencies. This initiative aims to combine procurement, IT, and finance into a single umbrella, with the goal of achieving $1 trillion in savings.
Despite courts blocking some of DOGE’s actions and inaccurate cost reductions, the network Musk has built inside the federal government is designed to last. Even if he stops working on DOGE full-time, few believe he’ll ever fully disengage from his projects.
DOGE staffers are political appointees at agencies with no fixed end dates, allowing them to stay in their positions for an extended period. Many top agency chief information officers and tech specialists come from Musk’s Silicon Valley pipeline, giving them sway over federal IT strategy for years to come.
Musk’s allies from Silicon Valley now hold key positions across the government, including Thomas Shedd at the Department of Labor and Clark Minor at the Department of Health and Human Services. These jobs were previously career positions that Trump and Musk turned into political appointments.
The approach mirrors Musk’s hands-on style at America PAC, a super PAC created by Musk that spent nearly $300 million on Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Musk is still in frequent contact with DOGE engineers, weighing in on which programs to gut and which departments to restructure.
DOGE staffers feel that their work is nowhere close to being finished, particularly in achieving the ambitious goal of centralizing procurement and introducing new tools and apps for Americans and federal workers to access government resources.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/04/musk-influence-after-he-leaves-doge-00272640