NPR has identified close to 40 entities — inside, adjacent to and outside of the government — where DOGE and the Trump administration have turned their attention in recent weeks.
Some of them have already been effectively dismantled by DOGE, like the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), the site of a dramatic daylong standoff between USIP staffers and representatives of the cost-cutting initiative claiming to be new leadership.
Some have been targeted for elimination by the president in his budget proposal for next year, like AmeriCorps and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
Some of them aren’t government agencies at all and, like GAO, have rebuffed DOGE’s requests, such as the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the private nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice.
And it’s not clear whether some of these actions are legal. On Monday, a federal judge blocked the DOGE-led takeover of USIP, ruling that the firing of board members, dismantling of operations and transfer of the institute’s headquarters are beyond Trump’s authority.
Nearly all of the meetings have been conducted by a small group of young staffers with no federal government experience and little apparent knowledge about what these entities do, according to more than a dozen lawsuits, documents shared with NPR and interviews with employees who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly and fear retaliation from the Trump administration.