President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency is moving through the executive branch, accessing computer systems, firing workers and highlighting what it claims is waste. But is it breaking things or actually helping?

JON: “The Department of Government Efficiency is absolutely helping.

Jon Fortt is here to weigh in.Put all the politicized handwringing about Elon Musk and President Trump aside for a moment. If you read the executive order that established DOGE, it makes a lot of sense.

This is an information technology overhaul of the federal government, long overdue. DOGE puts teams in every executive branch agency with at least a leader, an engineer, an HR specialist and a lawyer. There have been a lot of attention-grabbing headlines about how under DOGE, federal agencies Congress funded have shut down, cut probationary workers and canceled contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. On Monday, the Department of Education alone said it canceled 89 contracts worth $889 million.

Now, it does make sense that people are alarmed by the swift, blunt nature of these moves. Trump is the first president since the 1800s to move into a second term eight years after the first, determined to make changes and fully aware of the levers of presidential power. That puts DOGE in a historically rare position to overhaul the way government spends money and makes decisions – hopefully for the better.