With Tesla CEO Elon Musk no longer in charge, the Department of Government Efficiency’s aggressive actions to slash the federal workforce and wasteful spending have fallen into the background of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Musk left DOGE in late May after a chaotic tenure that featured multiple lawsuits, literal clashes between some agency workers and law enforcement, tensions among Cabinet members, and questions about whether billions of dollars of fraud had actually been slashed.

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Katie Miller, a senior aide for Musk’s work with DOGE, also exited and now hosts a podcast geared toward conservative women. Eight other core DOGE staffers left at the same time as Musk, too. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE staffer widely known as “Big Balls,” was physically attacked by a group of juveniles in Washington near Dupont Circle in early August. Cortistine is now with the Social Security Administration.

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan also refused to dismiss a lawsuit from 14 Democratic state attorneys general alleging Musk and DOGE’s efforts were illegal. Chutkan did, however, remove Trump from the lawsuit.

A spokesperson with the Office of Management and Budget told the Washington Examiner that DOGE continues to root out government waste daily. DOGE’s website claims it has saved roughly $206 billion— far below Musk’s original goal of $2 trillion in savings.

But the organization’s effectiveness remains mixed.

This week, the General Services Administration is asking hundreds of employees laid off by DOGE to decide by the end of this week whether to return. If they accept, they must return to work on Oct. 6 after essentially taking a seven-month paid vacation.

“GSA’s leadership team has comprehensively considered workforce actions and is making adjustments in the best interest of the customer agencies we serve and the American taxpayers,” a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “When we talk about the size and scope of this, it’s important to understand that the majority of our separations have been voluntary – the employee’s choice.”

The GSA, which manages buildings many federal agencies use, originally canceled hundreds of leases to save billions of dollars. Now, the organization’s Public Buildings Service, which had the most layoffs, is planning to reorganize beginning next month based on program rather than geography.

“In alignment with the Administration’s focus on efficiency, PBS is transitioning to an organizational model based on functional operations rather than the previous geographical structure with 11 separate regions,” according to a copy of a letter sent to colleagues obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Under the new model, PBS will be organized by program areas such as facilities management, portfolio management, acquisition, engineering, leasing, disposition, client engagement, and project management. PBS staff performing related functions will work from one national business unit.”

Other agencies affected by the DOGE firing spree have also had to reverse course and rehire workers. The Food and Drug Administration, Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, the National Park Service, and the National Nuclear Security Administration have all asked ex-employees to return to work.

“The whole approach of storming the offices of departments and agencies and then basically trying to unilaterally disband an entity in whole or in part was never going to work,” said GOP strategist Dennis Lennox.

Another Republican with ties to the White House claimed that DOGE still has some teeth, pointing to the work the GOP-controlled Congress has done.

“It does in the sense that you see this with the rescission packages,” the Republican, who requested anonymity, said. “They know where they have to go to get some money down.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, the former co-head of DOGE with Musk, claimed that he and Musk disagreed on the top priorities during an appearance on the Pod Force One podcast this week.

“From my perspective, we got a few things we got to address in the country,” Ramaswamy said. “One is the overgrown regulatory state. That can be addressed through executive power. And then we have an overgrown national debt problem, and that needs to be addressed through legislation.”

In mid-July, the House approved a $9 billion recissions package that clawed back $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and roughly $7 billion in foreign aid, also targeting the United States Agency for International Development. Trump signed the legislation into law.

Yet the Republican conceded that DOGE’s work has not been as easily accomplished as Musk once hoped.

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“The hardest thing ever with the federal government is, once there’s a program, it’s hard to pull it back. And I think that that’s what they found, and Elon found that out too, and Trump, to some extent, from his first term,” the source. “You can run a business like a business, but the federal government’s a whole different animal.”

The Republican added, “The problem is people on Capitol Hill don’t have the will to bring spending in line.”