Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency program has reportedly embedded itself within a key federal website handling over $500 billion in annual grant funding for agencies across the government.
DOGE will reportedly review and approve opportunities on grants.gov, which posts thousands of notices of grant opportunities each year from agencies such as the Departments of State, Interior and Defense, four unnamed sources close to the effort told The Washington Post.
A DOGE engineer has already removed federal officials’ permissions to post such opportunities without notifying the staffers, according to the sources, further entrenching the DOGE program’s influence on federal spending.
Separately, DOGE will have new authorities to review and approve funding notices from the National Institutes of Health, according to meeting records obtained by the outlet.
As part of its wider efforts to cut federal spending, the Trump administration has fired thousands of people from the health agency, used DOGE to help cancel grants with ties to diversity and inclusion, and sought to cut $2.6 billion in contracts. The administration has also pulled or threatened to pull billions in funding to universities as part of its efforts to crack down on alleged antisemitism on campus.
The DOGE effort, staffed with young tech allies and acolytes of Musk, has made using data and access to federal technology systems a key part of its agenda.
DOGE is reportedly involved in an effort to add living thousands of undocumented immigrants to a Social Security “death file” as a means to cut off their access to federal benefits and employment.
Despite attempting to access large swathes of federal data, DOGE has been accused of mishandling and misinterpreting that same information.
In February, it quietly deleted the five biggest savings it had posted on its much-touted “wall of receipts.”
Musk has frequently and inaccurately claimed that Social Security, meanwhile, is a “Ponzi scheme,” sending millions of dead people checks – however, less than one percent of the agency’s payments between 2015 and 2022 were improper, according to a 2024 inspector general report.
