Ramaswamy leaves DOGE, hints at future plans in Ohio

President Donald Trump’s associate Vivek Ramaswamy on Monday confirmed that he was no longer working with the administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency. He said that DOGE’s leader, tech billionaire Elon Musk, would successfully lead the new committee’s efforts to streamline the government. Trump had originally slated Ramaswamy to lead the organization alongside Musk.

Ramaswamy said that he would notify his supporters about his future plans in the coming days but said they would involve his home state of Ohio. Before entering the 2024 presidential campaign as a Republican, he was a serial entrepreneur, founding a pharmaceutical company, Roivant Sciences, in 2014.

How is DOGE getting created? Trump, on his first day in office, signed an executive order renaming the U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service—preserving the acronym USDS. The order also established a temporary organization called the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization with an 18-month mandate to make the government more efficient.

What, exactly, is this DOGE temporary organization supposed to focus on? Each federal agency would assign four of its employees to work with the U.S. DOGE Service on how to make its agency more efficient. DOGE will also work on making the U.S. cyber networks, software, and information technology systems more efficient and secure.

Dig deeper: Read Leo Briceno’s report in The Stew about what Trump needs in order to streamline the government.