By Chris Prentice and Douglas Gillison
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, or DOGE, has wrapped up work at the Securities and Exchange Commission and will exit the agency this week, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.
The group, originally led by billionaire Elon Musk, has overseen massive job cuts across the federal government since Trump, a Republican, took office in January. At the SEC, DOGE staff mostly focused on slashing contracts before turning to pushing for deregulation, Reuters has previously reported.
Trump in February appointed Musk to run DOGE outside the normal confines of government in a bid to “dismantle government bureaucracy,” which the pair said was wasteful and bloated.
Eliezer Mishory, who has led DOGE’s SEC work and was the group’s only representative at the agency in recent months, has concluded his work, said the sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the information in not yet public.
An SEC spokesperson said the agency was unable to comment due to the government shutdown.
DOGE’s arrival at the SEC in the early days of the Trump administration coincided with a broad-based effort to slash the federal workforce and eliminate whole agencies, causing many SEC rank-and-file to fear for their jobs.
Critics said DOGE’s work at the SEC marked a new level of White House involvement at an agency conceived by Congress to operate independently of the executive.
It was unclear how much of DOGE’s efforts would have a lasting imprint on the SEC. As part of the DOGE initiative, the agency offered several rounds of buyouts, resulting in deep cuts to the workforce at a time of market turbulence and dealmaking by the president.
DOGE also planned a restructuring of the agency’s IT functions and sought to influence regulations on blank-check companies and confidential reporting by private investment funds.
The SEC in March told the White House that its voluntary buyouts achieved much of the workforce reduction goals announced by Trump and Musk.
(Reporting by Douglas Gillison in Washington; Editing by Stephen Coates)
Comments