The Department of Government Efficiency officially closed on July 4, but the White House office it was built on top of never went anywhere — and according to a report from the Government Accountability Office released this week, that office can keep doing the same kind of work with no new authorization required.

Here is the distinction that matters. Trump’s executive order created a temporary body called the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which expired on July 4 as scheduled. That same order also permanently renamed an existing White House office — the U.S. Digital Service — as the U.S. DOGE Service. Only the temporary piece had an expiration date written into it. Because the order never called for shutting down the permanent entity, congressional investigators concluded that the office and staff placed at federal agencies could keep advancing the same initiatives after the temporary organization ended.

For companies that hold federal contracts, leases, or grants, that is the operative finding. The apparatus that spent the past eighteen months canceling contracts, terminating leases, and clawing back grant money was not dismantled on July 4. Only its temporary shell was. The broader U.S. DOGE Service continues to exist.

The report also puts numbers on a workforce that has never been fully counted. Investigators identified at least 206 people who worked for the cost-cutting effort while holding positions in the Executive Office of the President between January 20, 2025 and January 31, 2026, a figure that excludes staffers not assigned to that office. At least 128 of them had left those positions by the end of January. At least 27 were special government employees, a category that caps service at 130 days in any one-year period and permits outside employment. That mix is where the watchdog flagged conflict-of-interest risk, since special government employees can hold outside jobs and financial stakes while working for the government.

Getting even that much proved difficult. The Executive Office of the President said DOGE personnel received the same ethics and records-management training as everyone else in the office, but declined to hand over the training records or the financial disclosures themselves. Ten executive branch agencies either responded late or not at all. Neither the Executive Office of the President nor the Office of Personnel Management responded to requests to verify the report’s accuracy. The Office of Government Ethics told investigators it has not reviewed an Executive Office of the President ethics program since 2023. The ethics office also indicated it has no plans to examine the initiative’s activities, on the reasoning that it cannot review a program that no longer exists — precisely the gap the report identifies, since the entity that remains is the one nobody is examining.

This lands alongside a separate accounting review that has been circulating in Washington this week. The watchdog found that the effort did not follow its own stated method for calculating most of the savings it claimed from terminated contracts, could not supply enough information to verify the method behind 96 percent of its reported grant savings, and overstated lease savings by more than $80 million. In one case, a claimed $1.7 billion in savings was attributed to a single Pentagon health contract that was never actually canceled. The $110 billion reviewed covers only contracts, grants, and leases; the public total of $215 billion includes asset sales, workforce reductions, and regulatory changes, and has not been updated since January 1. Both reviews were requested by Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

The business consequences of the original push are already visible in hiring data. Federal headcount fell by more than 350,000, and agencies have since begun rebuilding — over 104,000 federal positions were advertised in the first five months of 2026, with some agencies reinstating employees after concluding the cuts had hit operations they could not do without. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was cited in a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing as one such case. Contractors who lost work in the first round are now bidding on rebuilt requirements at the same agencies.

More than a dozen lawsuits tied to the initiative’s actions are still pending, meaning the legal question of what was properly canceled remains open regardless of what happens administratively. The White House budget proposal in April requested $35 million for the U.S. DOGE Service, though lawmakers noted at the time that the effort had largely been wound down. Amy Gleason, who served as acting administrator, has since moved to lead a health technology office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

For federal vendors, the practical takeaway is that a shutdown announcement is not the same as a shutdown. The office remains funded, staffed, and unreviewed.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

© JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.