The effects of Doge’s initial blitz through the federal government – which included dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), embedding staffers in almost every agency and illegally firing people en masse – are still playing out. Contrary to Musk’s promises, Doge’s success is vague and tough to quantify. Measuring the full impact and determining whether the agency even exists as a centralized entity anymore is difficult, complicated by an ongoing effort from the government to block disclosure of documents, which is itself a symptom of the chaos that the department created.

Although the disarray and destruction left by Doge is evident across the globe, we still do not really know exactly how the agency operated and its true effects. Instead, humanitarian aid organizations are still trying to assess the extent of the damage that Doge created while ethics watchdogs have launched lawsuits trying to compel more transparency out of the government.

“I know it feels like all this happened over the course of several years, but the first year of this administration isn’t even done,” said Nikhel Sus, the deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew). “We still want to know what happened, and we still want the record to be out there, because the public is entitled to this information.”

Outside of the US, Doge’s cuts to USAID have also caused months of turmoil in countries around the world as humanitarian organizations struggle to make up for lost funding and calculate whether they can continue their operations at all. Thousands of aid workers have lost their jobs, testing for diseases such as HIV/Aids has drastically declined and researchers have warned there could be around 14 million excess deaths across the globe in the next five years if the US fails to restore aid funding. Yet because of the nature of Doge’s cuts, non-profits including the International Aids Society (IAS) say that it’s hard to pin down the exact numbers of people who are affected.