Trump orders Cabinet secretaries to work with DOGE on staffing, use a 'scalpel' on personnel decisions

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President Donald Trump on Thursday said he's ordered all of his Cabinet secretaries to work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and to use a "scalpel" when deciding which workers will remain in their jobs. 

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the Elon Musk-led group has "been an incredible success."

"And now that we have my Cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing," he wrote. "As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the 'scalpel' rather than the 'hatchet.'"

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Trump and Musk met with most of the secretaries, with Trump calling the gathering very "positive."

"It's very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it's also important to keep the best and most productive people," he said. "We're going to have these meetings every two weeks until that aspect of this very necessary job is done."

DOGE, as well as Musk, has come under heavy scrutiny from Democrats over its cost-cutting measures and attempts to gain access to sensitive data. 

On Wednesday, Musk met with a small group of House Republicans to discuss avenues for cost savings in a quest to find as much as $1 trillion in government waste, people familiar with the discussion told Fox News Digital.

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"The executive DOGE team is confident, they think they can get $1 trillion," one lawmaker familiar with the meeting told Fox News Digital. "Now, we'll see, right? And the thing is, he acknowledged that we're going to make mistakes, but we're going to correct them very quickly."

Democrats have accused Trump of giving Musk too much power as he focuses on Trump's promise to make the federal government more efficient. 

"Protests will not deter President Trump and Elon Musk from delivering on the promise to establish DOGE and make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers across the country," Harrison Fields, special assistant to the president and principal deputy press secretary, told Fox News Digital in a statement on Wednesday. 

Fox News Digital's Aubrie Spady and Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.