WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Wednesday establishing a Religious Liberty Commission, delivering a win for social conservatives that helped put him in office.

The order will be signed during a National Day of Prayer event in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, The Daily Wire can first report. The commission, composed of clergy, legal experts, and top allies, will be tasked with producing a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in the United States and threats to it.

It will be led by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Dr. Ben Carson will serve as vice chair. Other committee members will include Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson, Bishop Robert Barron, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Pastor Franklin Graham, Pastor Paula White, Gibson Dunn partner Allyson Ho, and Rabbi Meier Soloveichik.

The commission will focus on six specific areas: parental rights in education, conscience protections, attacks on houses of worship, free speech, school choice, and “institutional autonomy,” according to a White House summary of the order shared with the Daily Wire. That commission will advise the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council on executive or legislative actions as well as religious liberty policies.

The move builds on the president’s promise to protect Americans from threats to religious liberty. Trump has repeatedly pointed to how the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden showed an “egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” In the first weeks of his administration, Trump signed an executive order establishing a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.”

“The Biden Department of Justice sought to squelch faith in the public square by bringing Federal criminal charges and obtaining in numerous cases multi-year prison sentences against nearly two dozen peaceful pro-life Christians for praying and demonstrating outside abortion facilities,” Trump’s February order states.

It continues: “Those convicted included a Catholic priest and 75-year-old grandmother, as well as an 87-year-old woman and a father of 11 children who were arrested 18 months after praying and singing hymns outside an abortion facility in Tennessee as a part of a politically motivated prosecution campaign by the Biden Administration.  I rectified this injustice on January 23, 2025, by issuing pardons in these cases.”

That order notes that “Catholic churches, charities, and pro-life centers sought justice for violence, theft, and arson perpetrated against them, which the Biden Department of Justice largely ignored,” pointing to the FBI’s 2023 memo targeting traditional Catholics, the Biden Education Department’s attempts at repealing religious-liberty protections for faith-based organizations on college campuses, the Biden administration’s declaration that Easter Sunday was “Transgender Day of Visibility” and more.

“My Administration will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians,” the president’s order stated. “The law protects the freedom of Americans and groups of Americans to practice their faith in peace, and my Administration will enforce the law and protect these freedoms.  My Administration will ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified.”

The Department of Government Efficiency has helped federal agencies terminate 8,500 contracts, saving taxpayers up to $160 billion in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, it says. It also axed nearly 10,000 grants totaling $33 billion, including many from USAID.

It’s terminated nearly 650 leases, resulting in about $311 million in savings.

That totals about a fifth of the trillion dollars that Elon Musk hoped to cut from the federal budget — though many of the big-ticket savings were costs set to be spread over multiple years. And it remains to be seen whether it can keep cutting at the same pace, or whether the trajectory will slow with low-hanging fruit exhausted.

Musk has said he will soon spend significantly less time on DOGE as he returns focus to his private companies. He is currently classified as a “special government employee,” meaning he can only serve 130 days per year.

Other savings, not included in those figures, are likely to be realized over the long term thanks to process reforms spurred by DOGE. That includes revamping how federal expenditures are tracked, requiring each outlay to have an explanation, and cross-referencing expenditures with other databases to stop fraudulent or disallowed payments.

DOGE’s most important accomplishment may be shaking up Washington’s culture with a new spirit of optimism and creativity. Its existence has inspired department heads to make bold decisions in their own right. Items that conservatives had criticized for decades, but believed they had no choice but to accept, are now on the table. Some small agencies have been essentially abolished outright.

The office is operating out of the organizational skin of the U.S. Digital Service, an entity established by President Barack Obama to bring Silicon Valley talent into government for short-term stints. Obama created the legal structure for the group to operate out of the White House, and set a precedent of partisanship. The old USDS was so overtly liberal that when The Daily Wire visited its office on the White House complex on February 7, it was taunting the president with a “Hate Has No Home Here” poster in its window.

Now renamed the U.S. DOGE Service, it is formally run by Amy Gleason, a healthcare executive who worked at USDS during the first Trump administration.

Many of the contract terminations listed on DOGE’s website have relied on tech expertise, axing shockingly expensive payments for software to Beltway consulting firms. The biggest contract terminations are:

Nearly $3 billion for an “Office of Refugee Resettlement Influx Care Facility” to house “up to 3,000 unaccompanied alien children.” The contract was to Family Endeavors, which hit a contracting jackpot after adding a former Biden administration official to its payroll. Half a million children were separated from their parents because of a loophole that granted them the ability to stay in the United States if they were unaccompanied. The federal government kept the children secret from state child welfare agencies, even though they were vulnerable to sex and labor traffickers, and one-third of unaccompanied minors disappeared after they were sent to live with “sponsors.” Up to $1.9 billion for a seven-year contract providing technology services to the IRS. The contract to Centennial Technologies was signed in August 2024, and no money was spent before it was cancelled, according to federal records. In the last 10 years, Centennial has been listed as receiving only $15 million in government contracts. Up to $1.7 billion to A1FedImpact LLC for tech work for the Defense Health Agency. Federal contracting records list the potential total as $2.4 billion. A $1 billion contract to Securigence LLC, another government IT company in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., was cut in half. The contract was for “multi-network support services” for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A proposed $318 million contract to the Office of Personnel Management for “human resources related products and services” was cancelled before it was awarded.

The largest grants cancelled were:

$2.6 billion from USAID to the Gavi Foundation for “the global community’s Immunization Agenda 2030, which was endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 2020.” Nearly a billion dollars was spent before it was cancelled. A $1.5 billion contract from the Department of Health and Human Services to Texas was cut in half, with no details provided. Most of the money from a $1 billion USAID grant to the World Health Organization for “polio and immunization” was halted before it went out the door. Nearly half a billion was shaved off a $1.5 billion grant to Public Health Foundation Enterprises, Inc., operating as Heluna Health. Since 1998, the nonprofit had received a few million per year from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, operating as a pass-through that sends the money to other groups performing public health research or interventions. In 2020, that jumped to half a billion, and nearly $3 billion in 2021.

In other ways, DOGE has fallen short of its hopes, sometimes after running into the buzz-saw of institutional Washington. Courts, appeals panels, unions, and government rules have all bogged down attempts to implement layoffs or access government data.

The “Fork in the Road” buyouts offered to federal employees to reduce salary expenses — modeled after the choice Musk offered to Twitter employees after acquiring the company, were underwhelming — with fewer employees accepting the offer than would typically retire or leave government on their own in a given year.

Thousands of employees who didn’t accept the buyout have since been targeted with “reduction in force” layoffs, but some have been ordered reinstated by courts, and are now on paid leave. Federal personnel rules, which the Office of Personnel Management has not moved to rewrite, give strong deference to employees with the longest tenure, and could wind up pushing low-paid junior employees out of the workforce, while keeping more highly compensated and deeply entrenched ones — sometimes doing junior work at senior salaries.

Related: A DOGE Origin Story: How Barack Obama Laid The Groundwork For Elon Musk

Katie Miller, a spokesperson for DOGE, declined to provide The Daily Wire with a list of DOGE’s top accomplishments or comment on whether it is on track.

Ultimately, savings will only reduce the deficit if Congress aggressively slashes annual funding to agencies or passes “recision” packages that claw back money that was previously appropriated.

DOGE earned the support of the American people, even though its cuts could be painful, because Musk made a compelling case that spending money we don’t have was irresponsible and would lead to a debt bomb where a significant portion of federal expenditures did nothing more than pay interest on past debt. But Republicans may weaken that justification, and imperil support for DOGE, by passing a budget that makes the deficit grow even faster, thanks to military spending increases and tax cuts that more than cancel out any spending savings.

So far, the Republican-led government has not returned spending to pre-pandemic levels, much less cut it below that baseline. Between 2015 and 2018, the government spent about $5 trillion a year, according to the Treasury Department. That jumped to $8 trillion in 2020 and 2021, and $7 trillion in 2024.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Republican-led Senate’s plan for a 2025 budget would allow legislators to add $5.8 trillion to deficits over the next nine years, and require only 0.005% of projected spending through 2034 to be cut in order to pay down the deficit.

It said the Senate plan’s lack of spending reductions coupled with its tax breaks means that it would be worse for the deficit than major welfare programs and Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, and that the Senate plan would cut only a few billion from Democrat priorities like urban affairs, while adding hundreds of billions in deficit spending to Republican priorities like the military.

The Daily Wire has outlined remaining opportunities for savings, including:

Reform food stamps to exclude junk food and corner stores Abolish the $2 billion Job Corps Reform Social Security’s disability program Abolish all “social science” funding