Few at the MAGA White House would appear to have been happier seeing the tail end of Elon Musk’s tenure as government efficiency czar than Donald Trump’s budget bigwig Russell Vought.

“We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later,” the Office of Management and Budget chief is reported to have told his team as they watched the Tesla founder slash and burn his way through the federal government earlier this year, according to a Monday profile by The New York Times.

Vought is also understood to have been “outraged when DOGE sowed chaos by sending out an email requiring federal workers to detail five accomplishments each week or lose their jobs”—not because he was against firing those perceived to have underperformed, but because he felt there were ways of doing

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