Musk, who heads the DOGE effort, has mused to close allies about the idea of using a digital ledger as a way to squeeze costs out of the government, said one of the people, who asked for anonymity because the discussions haven’t been made public. There’s been talk of using a blockchain to track federal spending, secure data, make payments and even manage buildings, the people said.

People affiliated with DOGE have met with representatives of various public blockchains to evaluate their technology, a person with knowledge of the conversations said. 

Representatives for the White House and for DOGE didn’t return separate requests for comment. Musk didn’t reply to an emailed request for comment.

The talks have a certain intuitive logic, given that the name of Musk’s department is a cheeky reference to a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, that lives on its own blockchain. President Donald Trump has also been quickly putting in place cryptocurrency-friendly policies. On Thursday, he signed an executive order establishing a working group on digital assets that includes key members of his administration.

Created by Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order, DOGE is charged with modernizing federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency and productivity. Trump has said the group will work with the White House Office of Management and Budget to identify spending cuts and finish its recommendations by July 4, 2026.

Musk enlisted about 100 volunteers before Trump was inaugurated to write code for his projects, one person said. 

The blockchain would be one of several technological tools that Musk and his team may try to use to cut costs and eliminate wasteful spending, fraud and abuse — a key issue Trump campaigned on in 2024. Trump has decried the country’s ballooning deficit, blaming much of it on programs and policies initiated by his predecessor. 

One person who traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, in December pitched Trump transition officials on several ways a blockchain might be used, focusing on the technology’s potential to protect important government data and track flows of money.  

The blockchain concept was first introduced by Bitcoin as a way to record and verify transactions of the digital token without a central authority. Since then, many other crypto projects have created their own blockchains for similar purposes, with most of them offering a public ledger that can be reviewed by anyone.

Trump’s business associates chose the ledger associated with the Solana cryptocurrency to issue the Trump and Melania memecoins that have drawn interest and criticism in recent days. It is, though, unclear which blockchain Musk’s team might use for its projects, and the talks may end up going nowhere. 

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The idea of using a blockchain for large-scale projects isn’t new, though applying one to an enterprise as large as the US government remains an untested concept. Years ago, a slew of large companies such as retailer Walmart Inc. launched blockchain efforts. Most of these projects used private blockchains that didn’t make transactions publicly viewable.

Often run by consortia, most of those blockchain efforts were hard to govern and stalled. Many also discovered that blockchains weren’t necessarily less expensive or more efficient than existing database technology. Back in 2019, Gartner predicted that “90% of current enterprise blockchain platform implementations will require replacement by 2021” to remain competitive and secure.

Sam Hammond, the chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, said that “an internal government blockchain could be used to track spending, documents and contracts in a way that’s fully secure and transparent.” 

But, Hammond added, “the question is whether you really need a blockchain to do that, since conventional databases can be used in a similar way and with fewer downsides.”

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Public blockchains, like those used by Bitcoin and Solana, come with their own problems, given that such ledgers are governed by decentralized networks of computers.

“One issue with the government using a public Blockchain is that they would have no control over the entries,” said Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University. “I think that loss of control would be a problem for governments.”

But some bigger institutions have started using public blockchains for business purposes in recent years. BlackRock, for example, has issued a money-market fund on the the ledgers of a few different cryptocurrencies. And the California Department of Motor Vehicles had digitized millions of car titles on the Avalanche blockchain. 

If DOGE pursued the technology it would likely dwarf any government project seen in the US to date.