By Joshua Arnold

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officially concluded its operations on Saturday, passing its mandate on to individual agencies. “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle. “He has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer.”

Planned obsolescence was part of DOGE’s mission from its first conception. “The final step of @DOGE is to delete itself,” said Elon Musk, who thought up the idea, in 2024. In his January 2025 executive order, President Trump specifically assigned DOGE an 18-month lifespan. “The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026,” he ordered.

But the end of DOGE did not entail the end of its mission. “The termination of the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall not be interpreted to imply the termination, attenuation, or amendment of any other authority or provision of this order.”

“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Trump declared.

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing,” DOGE quoted former President Teddy Roosevelt in a goodbye tweet. “It has been our greatest honor to serve the American people. Happy 4th!”

At conception, DOGE was assigned the ambitious goal of saving the government $2 trillion dollars through cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That goal was later revised to $1 trillion — still highly ambitious.

Late last year, DOGE estimated that it had found $214 billion in government savings and mostly concluded its work. These savings included selling assets; ending duplicative software licenses; canceling contracts, leases, and grants; identifying fraud and improper payments, and workforce reductions. If this number is accurate, DOGE achieved a 0.54% reduction in the national debt, The Hill estimated.

Since President Trump resumed office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 272,000, due to a hiring freeze, early retirement offerings, and other cuts. Nearly 140,000 federal employees left the federal government under a deferred resignation program that offered employees extra pay to leave.

One group estimated the cost of the deferred resignation program at $10 billion, although its effects may recoup those costs in the long run. Additionally, for FY 2027, the Trump administration requested $35 million from Congress in “reimbursable program activity” of DOGE, suggesting that cutting costs is not completely free.

Thus, DOGE closes its doors with a record that is positive, but not glowing. The savings it found totaled a fifth of its over-ambitious objective (even after that was revised in half). Its inexpert operation sowed unnecessary chaos and angst in Washington, sometimes clashing with agencies or inaccurately targeting necessary work. But it did save the government a hefty chunk of change, and it brought all this to public attention at the bureaucratic equivalent of light-speed.

Although DOGE’s sun has finally set, that does not mean its objective was pointless or even abandoned. “While the formal mission of DOGE has come to an end, the mission to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse will continue,” DOGE’s goodbye tweet declared. “Good stewardship of taxpayer dollars and accountable government are not temporary initiatives. We hope those principles endure long into America’s next 250 years.”

It turns out that operating an anti-waste, anti-fraud taskforce out of the White House was a clunky way to tackle those problems. Now that the Trump administration feels itself firmly in control of government agencies, it feels comfortable relocating those functions in the agencies themselves, where they most naturally belong. Slashing improper payments and wasteful grants are now the province of the Agriculture Department (USDA), the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and other departments and agencies. Every few months, it seems, a new administrative agency publishes the results of its fraud investigations.

This is as it should be. DOGE operated like a surgeon’s scalpel — a foreign object intruding into government to clear out the most infected areas. Agencies sleuthing out their own fraud is like the body’s natural immune response — a constant, background system that eliminated the infection without needing to resort to the extreme solution of surgery.

The stunning point is that DOGE’s surgery-like intrusion was needed at all. In a healthy government, the internal immune response to fraud and waste would not seemingly stall.

Now, that internal immune response has been restored, a resolution that suggests two conclusions. First, those running these government agencies are actually in charge, not merely placeholders hopelessly outclassed by bureaucratic evasion. Second, government agencies are now being run by people who believe in slimmer and more effective government.

That belief is what propelled DOGE’s mission from Day One, and the success it achieved — widespread, though not absolute — will likely go down in history as one of the best outcomes from President Trump’s second term.

But DOGE’s last act was one of its most important: self-deletion. However well-intentioned at first, government agencies have a tendency, when their original purpose is fulfilled, to search out new tasks to justify their existence. For a government agency to deliberately disband is so rare as to almost qualify as a magic trick.

Behold! The astonishing, vanishing DOGE! Here for 18 months only! Come watch as it pokes and prods at a bloated government, squeezing away nearly a quarter trillion dollars’ worth of spending Uncle Sam never had. But don’t blink — DOGE will vanish in the blink of an eye. And, well, there it went.

Goodbye, DOGE, wherever you may be. May America never require your services again! Alas, how soon we may have cause to summon you again. For now, goodnight, rest in the peace of a task well in hand.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

This article originally appeared here.