DOGE is a force Americans can’t afford to ignore | From seniors to Lutheran charity networks, millions of people you wouldn’t think would be targets are under threat

> In 1912 parishioners from a few churches in Columbus, Ohio, pooled their money to start a charity to provide pro bono care for the poor. Over time, the organization, now called Lutheran Social Services of Central Ohio, grew to employ about 700 and includes food pantries that served more than 2 million meals last year, a domestic violence shelter that cared for nearly 1,000 adults and children, shelters and free health care for 1,100 people who can’t afford a place to stay, and affordable housing for another 1,000 seniors and disabled people. This work is subsidized by local churches, the United Way, local and state authorities, and the federal government, which is the organization’s single largest contributor and accounts for roughly 20% of its annual budget.

> Beneficiaries pay, too, when they can. In general, though, client fees are modest and many services are free. Many of the people the Lutheran nonprofit helps have nowhere else to go. Some are victims of domestic violence. Most are unable to afford life’s necessities without help. “In today’s economy, when you get sick or lose your job, things can spiral,” says Rachel Lustig, the Lutheran group’s chief executive officer. “Our services help people through that and get them to a place where they can contribute to society.”

> Lustig’s organization is one node in a vast network of private not-for-profits that make up a more than $200 billion chunk of the US service sector. They’re load-bearing links in America’s safety net. While many are affiliated with religious orders, Lustig says their messages tend toward the universal. “Jesus called us to care for the poor, but these aren’t values that Christian churches have a monopoly over,” she says. She’d never thought of her work as controversial until Elon Musk found his way to Washington.

> On Jan. 31, Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE (as in the dog-themed cryptocurrency), acquired access to payment systems inside the Department of the Treasury. Chaos ensued. A top Treasury official tried to block Musk, then abruptly retired. A top Senate Democrat issued a panicked letter warning that Musk could cut off Social Security payments. Nineteen state attorneys general and three large labor unions filed lawsuits to stop Musk from accessing the sensitive systems.
Musk did what he almost always does when he finds himself at the center of a scandal: He kept posting. “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” he wrote on X, his social media platform, on Feb. 1, a Saturday.

> Later that night, Musk came across a message from Michael Flynn, the retired general who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators during the first Trump administration. (Near the end of his first term, Trump pardoned Flynn, who served as national security adviser for about three weeks in 2017.) Flynn, now a right-wing influencer and activist, posted a spreadsheet listing federal grants to a dozen or so Lutheran charities. These included Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota ($1.4 million), Lutheran Services Carolinas ($600,000), Allegheny Lutheran Social Ministries ($17.1 million) and two grants to Lustig’s group worth $8.2 million. Flynn referred to “the ‘Lutheran’ faith”—he put the Protestant denomination’s name in scare quotes—as a “money laundering operation” and called for federal funds to be cut. At 3 a.m., Musk reposted Flynn’s commentary and said he was taking action. “The DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

> By the time Lustig saw the tweets, there were replies accusing the Lutheran charities of facilitating illegal immigration and child sex trafficking. “It felt very shocking,” she says. The two grants that Musk had suggested would be canceled are supposed to be paid out as reimbursements for expenses and account for roughly half of the federal funding the organization receives in a year.

> Lutheran Social Services of Central Ohio hasn’t submitted a reimbursement request since Musk’s tweets, and Lustig doesn’t know what will happen the next time it does. She doesn’t know why her group was singled out. “It’s the lack of understanding that’s frustrating,” she says. “And then your heart goes out to the people that we serve, who otherwise will not have access to care.”
The frustration, fear and uncertainty have been repeated across the country—not only at other Lutheran charities, but among Catholic aid workers abroad whose jobs are at risk amid Musk’s attempted closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cancer researchers whose National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding is suddenly in jeopardy, and civil servants who have spent weeks in a sort of limbo state, unable to work under the conditions Musk has created but, as yet, unwilling to quit. Musk has portrayed all of this as healthy, a sort of strategic chaos that’s needed to shake up a system he and many other Republicans consider fundamentally broken. As Trump put it at a press conference in early February, “We have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.” And the excesses of government spending are a familiar target for members of either party looking to gesture at bipartisanship.