President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 11 directing all agency heads to work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut staff and limit hiring in the federal government.
The president signed the order in the Oval Office alongside DOGE head Elon Musk on Tuesday. Trump discussed weeding out government corruption and let Musk speak about DOGE’s goals.
Musk said he wants “common sense controls” applied to government. The tech CEO added that there remain good people in the federal bureaucracy—which he called an “unelected” fourth branch of government—but that bureaucrats still need to be held accountable.
The order continues Trump’s efforts to make sweeping changes to federal government and its bureaucracy, after campaign promises to downsize its footprint. He created DOGE by executive order in January to audit federal spending and locate inefficiencies.
Trump has repeatedly vowed to shutter the Department of Education, and his administration has already announced plans to fold the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) into the State Department, drawing the ire of many congressional Democrats who wanted the agency to retain its independence.
According to a fact sheet on Tuesday’s order provided by the White House, agency heads will consult with DOGE to shrink the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions.
The Office of Personnel Management will create rules to ensure federal workers are “held to the highest standards of conduct.” After the expiration of the Trump administration’s Jan. 20 hiring freeze, all federal agencies will be allowed to hire no more than one employee for every four who leave or are released from their positions.
Agencies will also begin plans for large-scale reductions in force and to determine which agency components—or agencies themselves—might be eliminated or combined, the fact sheet states.
A reporter asked Musk about DOGE’s detractors, who have called the advisory commission’s work a “hostile takeover” of federal agencies.
“The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said from the White House. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
Musk also downplayed any conflicts of interest he may have in leading DOGE, as his company SpaceX is a leading aerospace contractor for the federal government.
“Transparency is what builds trust,” Musk said, adding that the public can see if anything benefits him or his companies.
Trump offered reassurance that there were no problems with Musk leading DOGE and suggested that the commission had already found billions in wasteful government spending.
The original restraining order blocked Musk, who has been appointed as a “special government employee,” and others in DOGE who are not civil servants from accessing the payment records.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas declined to dissolve the order but agreed to modify it to clarify that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Senate-confirmed senior department officers are not prohibited from accessing the department’s payment systems.
“Currently, Treasury staff members working with Tom Krause, a Treasury employee, will have read-only access to the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to continue this operational efficiency assessment,” the agency wrote.
“This is similar to the kind of access that Treasury provides to individuals reviewing Treasury systems, such as auditors, and that follows practices associated with protecting the integrity of the systems and business processes.”
