On the evening of May 28, 2025, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has spearheaded the Trump administration's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term in January 2025, announced he was stepping down from his role in government.
Musk made the announcement in a post (archived) on X, the social media platform he owns. The post read:
As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.
The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.
(X user @elonmusk)
Musk's post referenced his status as a special government employee. As we reported when we first looked into rumors about Musk leaving DOGE in April, special government employees can work for the federal government for only 130 days per 365-day period. As Politico reported on Feb. 2, a 2024 U.S. Office of Government Ethics legal advisory notes that special government employees can, in "unforeseen circumstances," exceed that limit without risking their eligibility in future years. What that means in practice is not certain.
It was not clear exactly when Musk became a special government employee or, as a result, when his 130-day term would officially run out. Estimates have ranged between May 30 (130 days after Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration and two days before Musk announced his departure) and June 13 (130 days after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Musk's special government employee status on Feb. 3).
The above estimates assume Musk worked seven-day weeks, something he claimed to do as recently as March 27 — although on May 27 he told Ars Technica he had reduced the time he spent on government work "significantly in recent weeks."
In a May 29 news
As you know, Elon Musk announced last night his departure as an official special government employee from the Trump administration. We thank him for his service. We thank him for getting DOGE off the ground.
At the time of this writing, anonymous White House officials had also confirmed Musk's immediate departure — but not the reason for it — to outlets including Reuters, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
ABC News also reported that an unnamed "senior administration official" confirmed Musk would "continue to serve as an unofficial adviser to the president," echoing comments Musk reportedly made in an April earnings call for Tesla, one of the companies for which he serves as CEO.
An article (archived) in The New York Times suggested Musk left at least in part due to tension with other members of the Trump administration over matters including the budget package commonly referred to as the "Big Beautiful Bill" — but also noted that "Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials."
On May 29, Musk shared posts (archived) from other X users (archived) who said Musk's departure was solely due to his time as a special government employee ending, and that "legacy media" was attempting — falsely, according to the posts — to spin the departure as the result of a break between Musk and Trump.
(X user @cb_doge)
It was also not immediately clear what DOGE's future would look like without Musk, although the billionaire was not technically the group's administrator. In February 2025 the White House confirmed that the holder of that title was Amy Gleason.
In a December 2024 X post (archived), entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — initially a DOGE figurehead alongside Musk — said that DOGE had an "expiry date" of July 4, 2026.
The Jan. 20 executive order establishing DOGE likewise said the president's "18-month DOGE agenda" would "terminate" on July 4, 2026.
However, it remained unclear whether that end date applied to the entirety of the United States DOGE Service — the Trump administration's new name for the United States Digital Service, which was established during the presidency of Barack Obama — or merely the service's cost-cutting initiative that Musk championed.
In the May 29 press briefing, Leavitt answered a reporter's question about the future of DOGE without directly addressing whether Musk's departure meant the effective end of the initiative or the USDS as a whole, saying (starting around the 29:18 mark):
The entire cabinet is involved, and I spoke to the president about it this morning, and the entire cabinet understands the need to cut government waste, fraud and abuse, and each cabinet secretary of their respective agencies is committed to that. That's why they were working hand in hand with Elon Musk and they'll continue to work with the respective DOGE employees who have onboarded as political appointees at all of these agencies. So surely the mission of DOGE will continue, and many DOGE employees are now political appointees of our government, and to the best of my knowledge all of them intend to stay and continue this important work.
Responding to a follow-up question about DOGE's future leadership, Leavitt said, "The DOGE leaders are each and every member of the president's cabinet, and the president himself, who is wholeheartedly committed to cutting waste, fraud and abuse from our government."
Snopes' archives contributed to this report.