Somewhere in the world last month, a State Department employee began the routine process of hiring a vendor for an upcoming embassy event — but quickly ran into a problem.
DOGE vowed to make government more ‘efficient’ — but it’s doing the opposite
New procedures and requirements — some implemented in the name of improving operations — are slowing down federal agencies.
June 2, 2025 The Washington Post
Then he got busy: The work-around, he knew, would take time. First, he got his ambassador’s signed approval to hire the vendor anyway. Next, he filled out an Office 365 form justifying the expense in 250 words before selecting which “pillar” of necessary spending it fell under, choosing from options including “Safer, Stronger, More Prosperous.” After submitting that to higher-ups and getting their sign-off, he filled out yet another form — this one destined for political appointees back in Washington.
A week later, the vendor was secured. Under any previous administration, it would have taken one day, the employee said.
Similar layers of new red tape are plaguing federal staffers throughout the government under the second Trump administration, stymieing work and delaying simple transactions, according to interviews with more than three dozen federal workers across 19 agencies and records obtained by The Washington Post. Many of the new hurdles, federal workers said, stem from changes imposed by the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, which burst into government promising to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse and trim staff and spending.
The team’s overarching goal was in its name: DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, although it is not part of the Cabinet. But as Musk departed government on Friday, many federal workers said DOGE has in many ways had the opposite effect.
DOGE’s intense scrutiny of federal spending is forcing employees to spend hours justifying even the most basic purchases. New rules mandating review and approval by political appointees are leaving thousands of contracts and projects on ice for months. Large-scale firings spearheaded by DOGE have cut support offices — especially IT shops — that assisted federal workers with issues ranging from glitching computers to broken desk chairs. And the piecemeal reassignment of staff is causing significant lags in work in some agencies, notably Social Security, as inexperienced workers adjust to new roles.
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Meanwhile, most everyone, across every agency, is dealing with fallout from new policies or executive orders — even as colleagues continue to resign or retire, increasing the workload for those who remain.
“Leadership is overcome with meetings and questions from people on how this will all work. The Human Resource teams have conflicting information, and confusion reigns,” said one Defense Department employee who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. Every day, he said, it feels like “each person still standing is battling a dozen fires.”
Many presidents try to reshape the sprawling federal bureaucracy to achieve their specific policy goals, said George Krause, a University of Georgia professor who studies public administration. Such efforts span Democratic and Republican administrations back to Richard M. Nixon, whose political appointees were known for clashing with career federal executives, Krause said.
But the DOGE-driven efforts appear to be backfiring in ways that other initiatives did not.
“What Musk showed is that you cannot do this without a plan, and if you do it without a plan that respects some of the functions of government that everybody wants, then what’s going to happen is you’ll end up making the government less efficient, and not more efficient,” said Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration official.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement that, through DOGE, “President Trump is curbing government waste and reforming a system that has long burdened American taxpayers.” He added: “Anyone resistant to these critical reforms has had ample opportunity to step aside, but the work of DOGE will press forward unobstructed.”
The State Department on Saturday shared an emailed statement from a “senior official” it declined to name: “The State Department will never apologize for putting processes in place to ensure taxpayer dollars are used correctly. It’s what the American people expect and deserve.” But on Friday, almost exactly 24 hours after a Post reporter asked about the requirement that international vendors certify they do not promote DEI, State had issued guidance rescinding that mandate for staff overseas, according to a directive obtained by The Post.
‘Holding up everything’
At NASA, employees recently wrote several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails, to win approval to buy simple fastening bolts, according to a staffer and records obtained by The Post.
Within the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, more than 1,500 project requests — included fully executed leases and notices saying construction can begin — backed up in an internal tracker awaiting political appointees’ attention, records show. Some items waited for months, and almost 200 are still on hold, while about 300 were never approved, an employee said.
And at the Food and Drug Administration, once-routine tests on food — monitoring for accuracy in labeling, coloring and exposure to heavy metals — were delayed significantly, a former employee said. That’s because the agency began requiring department-level approval for expenses at every step: Purchasing samples to test. Paying to ship samples between labs. Buying lab supplies.
This hands-on approach reflects the Trump administration’s drive to rein in what officials see as decades of unsupervised, wasteful federal spending. Speaking in the Oval Office in early February, Trump said, without providing evidence, that there are “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse … That’s one of the reasons I got elected.”
Citing the example of the Treasury Department, Musk claimed the government is missing “basic controls that should be in place that are in place in any company,” such as categorizing payments by code and providing justifications for each expense. (Systems to do both already existed across agencies.)
And so shortly after Trump’s inauguration, DOGE imposed a $1 federal credit card freeze and limited purchasing power to only a handful of people in many departments, decisions that have incapacitated parts of agencies as varied as the National Park Service and the Pentagon. Soon, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commerce Department required that political appointees green-light many funds before disbursement. In April, DOGE wrested control of a federal grants website used to dole out billions each year.
Many federal employees said they supported closer inspections of how the government spends money. But in practice, they said, the Trump administration’s chokehold is tangling up basic, everyday tasks.
The results seem to run counter to the goal of efficiency.
At air traffic control towers at two dozen West Coast airports, officials are unable to easily pay to have the windows washed and shades cleaned, said a Federal Aviation Administration employee. A DOGE-ordered overhaul of the payments system means FAA staffers must write statements justifying all expenditures, the employee said — not just for window-washing, but also elevator maintenance and even pens and pencils, the employee said. Purchase orders that used to take 15 or 20 minutes to fill out now consume 1 or 2 hours for each tower.
“These are things that people don’t think about, but clean windows are crucial for controllers,” the employee said. Because he is so often busy with purchase justifications, he has fallen behind on landscaping, fire alarm safety and pest control, all of which are “staples in the air traffic towers,” he said.
The added reviews extend beyond financial issues to questions of policy and political speech, including press releases.
At some parts of the National Institutes of Health, per an employee there, every grant must now be fed through an AI tool to screen for references to concepts deemed unpalatable by the Trump administration, such as “DEI, transgender, China, or vaccine hesitancy,” the employee said. Further delaying grants is another new requirement: NIH staff must check to ensure the recipient isn’t on the list of colleges and universities that have drawn Trump’s wrath, including Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, Brown and Cornell.
At the State Department, employees are spending hours combing through official documents to remove the words “diverse,” equitable” and “inclusive,” said a staffer there, months after Trump issued his executive order ending diversity efforts.
NASA, the NIH, GSA, the FDA and the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
‘Nobody is working at top efficiency’
The administration’s ongoing shake-ups of the workforce, from buyout offers to firings to sweeping reorganizations, are also undermining efficiency.
At the Social Security Administration, for example, Trump officials and DOGE pushed thousands of central-office workers to take lower-level positions answering phones in field offices, threatening to fire whoever did not make the jump, according to emails reviewed by The Post and interviews with a half dozen agency employees.
Chaos has ensued across field offices in the weeks since the reassignments took effect, staffers said. Claims processing has bogged down as regular field office staff — already overburdened because of widespread resignations and retirements — are pulled off their normal duties to train incoming administrators and analysts.
But the backlog means the trainings are being shortened and rushed through, employees said, so inexperienced, reassigned staffers start work unprepared. That leads to more mistakes, more requests for help and more backed-up claims — and more time wasted all around.
To sum it up, “you now have half the staff with very little knowledge of how to do the work,” one relocated staffer said. “And the other half of staff overwhelmed with work and unable to really train or mentor these new folks.”
Asked about the reassignments, Social Security provided an emailed statement from an unnamed official, whom it declined to identify. The statement said DOGE’s work at Social Security had charted a new, better course for the agency.
“The voluntary reassignment of approximately 2,000 employees to direct service positions has not caused disruptions at the agency,” the statement read. “As these employees complete their training and become fully proficient in their new positions, they will further accelerate the progress the agency is making.”
DOGE reorganized other agencies by dismissing gobs of technical staffers, or incentivizing them to resign, and centralizing IT services. Although it sounded good in theory, said one Interior Department staffer, in practice, it meant he lost his in-office IT contact. He used to pop around the corner to ask for assistance — now, help tickets take up to three days.
In other places, staff dismissals or departures are tripping up operations, as employees struggle to keep up with a sharply increased workload.
One office in the Transportation Department lost nearly 15 percent of its staff, who were fired as probationary employees, then rehired, then promptly took advantage of the administration’s second-round deferred resignation offer to leave for good, said a worker there.
“Now, all those jobs and responsibilities [have fallen on] everyone left,” the worker said. “There’s a learning curve, no knowledge transfer, and in some cases no access to do the job for a while. Lots of productivity lost.”
Within one FDA office, a reduction in force removed everyone who worked in administrative support, a former staffer said: The people who coordinated travel, ran purchasing and processed personnel paperwork. Remaining staff were given general email addresses to contact, the staffer said, “but no names.”
Asked for comment, a range of agencies asserted that Trump was improving efficiency, not hurting it.
“President Trump’s decisive actions have allowed us to eliminate bureaucratic waste,” said an Interior department spokesperson.
“We are replacing outdated, sluggish systems with streamlined, mission-driven operations,” said an HHS spokesperson, “following years of unchecked spending, bureaucratic bloat, and ideologically driven initiatives that strayed from serving the American people.”
But other employees say that strict imposition of Trump’s return-to-office rule and requirements that federal workers must be in their seats from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. sharp are frustrating staffers, who say their productivity and drive have dropped.
Within a research arm of the Defense Department, staff no longer take work home or travel to conferences on weekends, noted one employee.
At FEMA, people have to take a day off or work a half-day to make medical appointments, rather than working remotely and missing fewer hours, said a staffer there.
One Department of Homeland Security staffer noted that after her hours were changed to 9-5, it briefly prevented her from attending an 8 a.m. meeting — until higher-ups realized the problem and changed it. (DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement that “meetings being moved is a small price to pay for federal employees to finally be back in their taxpayer funded offices to do their work for the American people.”)
Atop everything else, frayed, fatigued federal workers have little capacity left to do their jobs well, or at all, they said.
“People are so demoralized, anxious and sleep deprived,” said a NASA employee. “Nobody is working at top efficiency.”