Forgetting that Musk won't touch the 84% of the budget that isn't entitlement spending & therefore will cut government spending by 2-3% at most (see link below), he's destroying the workplace environs/morale for 2+ million workers...treating them like expendables. Good luck retaining or attracting talent. Net downside...all the way.
But it's worse than that. Every one of Musk's companies is highly dependent on the federal government to survive. To keep Chinese EV car makers out of the US, to keep NASA using Space X rockets...should I continue?
And what happens to any federal employee or regulator who does something Musk doesn't like or fails to agree with a negotiating demand...they get threatened with termination.
For Trump to place this kind of power in the hands of someone whose economic interests aren't the US taxpayers and who is autistic bordering on nuts is...the word that comes to mind is treasonous...but I suppose that's too strong. I'm not impressed.
Inside DOGE’s Clash With the Federal Workforce
With a surprise incursion in the first minutes of the Trump presidency, Elon Musk’s programmers seized control of a key personnel agency; ‘rogue bureaucrats’ fight back
By Scott Patterson, Josh Dawsey and Brian Schwartz, WSJ
Feb. 27, 2025 9:02 pm ET
WASHINGTON, D.C.–At 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, as Donald Trump was being sworn in as president for the second time, programmers linked to Elon Musk’s nascent government-efficiency project wanted to access computer systems within the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Senior officials at OPM, the government’s human-resources arm, didn’t help, but Musk’s programmers quickly found assistance in an unlikely source: Chuck Ezell, a midlevel OPM information-technology supervisor from Georgia who had just been named acting director.
By roughly 12:30 p.m., the programmers had gained entry to a vast trove of information about the entire federal workforce.
The lightning-fast incursion at OPM took place hours before Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was officially created by an executive order. It was the first salvo in what one former employee at the agency described as a “cold war” between Musk’s programmers and the government’s sprawling workforce.
DOGE programmers operating in the shadows of the federal bureaucracy have burrowed into computer systems across the government, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid.
DOGE’s efforts have resulted in thousands of layoffs, sending shock waves through the ranks. Federal workers involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs were among its first targets. Also fired in the name of increased efficiency: nuclear-arsenal scientists, veterans-affairs officials, healthcare researchers, national-park rangers, clean-energy experts and air-safety workers.
The drama in Washington, D.C., over the sudden, brazen influence of Musk and his band of DOGE programmers is unlike anything in the city’s modern history.
“They’ve shaken government workers to their core,” said Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat. “Morale is low. People are paranoid and they’re scared. I’m tired of the demonization of public employees. They’re pitting people against each other.”
DOGE employees, many of whom previously worked for Musk companies such as SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink, are seen by federal workers as mortal threats to their careers and the agencies many have dedicated their lives to. Musk and Trump argue they have a mandate from voters to slash the scale of government at will. Indeed, the pair campaigned together last year and made clear Musk would have a role looking at making the government more efficient. But they had originally said DOGE would be outside the federal government, and even some top Trump advisers didn’t expect Musk to have this much influence.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said DOGE “has fully integrated into the federal government to cut waste, fraud and abuse” and “will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover.” He said many inside the government needed to get with the program.
“Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people and their obstructionist efforts will fail,” Fields said.
Musk has repeatedly provided assurances that his goal is to reduce costs and fraud across the government. At a Feb. 11 press conference in the Oval Office, Musk said DOGE’s activities are “maximally transparent.”
This account of DOGE’s clash with the federal workforce and their efforts to take over vast swaths of the federal government’s computer systems is based on over two dozen interviews with current and former government employees and senior officials with the Trump administration.
Cloaked in secrecy
Inside agencies, career staff look upon the DOGE programmers with fear and suspicion. Several said they believe they’re under surveillance and are careful about what they say inside government buildings. Some have taken to calling DOGE members “muskrats” and “muskovites.” Many on both sides communicate primarily on the encrypted Signal app.
“The DOGE guys are distrustful of the federal government and think everyone should have to justify their jobs—or be eliminated,” said one person involved in the DOGE effort. “And the workers say: ‘Who are you again?’”
Current and former government employees said DOGE programmers and their operations are cloaked in secrecy. Some believe DOGE officials have been recording group calls on the Microsoft Teams collaboration tool. Inside one agency, employees have begun checking to see whether DOGE employees still have active accounts, hoping the carnage is over. Some have begun reverse-tracking through computer systems to trace which data DOGE has accessed.
An administration official said DOGE operated in secrecy partially because they know federal employees are opposed to their efforts and would want to thwart them. There are also safety concerns. “DOGE employees will continue to do their jobs amidst violent threats in order to shine a light on the fraud they uncover,” the White House said in a statement.
Musk’s blitzkrieg assault on the federal government has drawn pushback, even from within the Trump administration itself. Chief of staff Susie Wiles recently asked him to provide regular updates about his plans because people in the White House have been caught by surprise, according to senior administration officials. Some cabinet officials have complained to the White House about the suddenness of DOGE’s moves, other administration officials said, including unannounced incursions onto their turf and some of Musk’s tweets.
Matters reached a head on Saturday, when Musk said federal employees must detail their accomplishments at work or risk losing their jobs, prompting open resistance by some senior officials. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel told employees to “pause any response” to Musk’s note. Some officials across the government including at the State, Justice, Defense and Health and Human Services departments sent similar emails to their teams, according to people familiar with the matter and messages viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Trump moved to squelch any rebellion in the first cabinet meeting of his new term, which Musk attended. “Some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled,” Trump said. He added later, addressing his cabinet, “Is anyone unhappy with Elon?”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said “everyone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump. Any notion to the contrary is false.”
Musk has an office in the White House, where he jumps into some meetings, Trump advisers say, and has begun giving Wiles thrice-weekly updates about what he is doing. But he often works from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, steps away from the White House, where he sits with his team, overwhelmingly male, in a large conference room.
Musk, the world’s richest person who continues to helm Tesla and SpaceX while simultaneously serving as a special government employee advising the president, oversees DOGE activities. But the White House on Tuesday identified Amy Gleason, who served in the first Trump administration, as acting administrator of DOGE.
Information about the size of the DOGE team hasn’t been made public, and some staffers are assigned to other agencies. Others bounce around, fanning out to federal buildings across the city armed with executive authority to enter and access government computer systems, according to people familiar with their activities.
After OPM, one of DOGE’s first stops was the offices of U.S. Digital Service, which provided information-technology services to federal agencies and was housed at the Eisenhower building before it was renamed the U.S. DOGE Service by the Trump administration. On Jan. 21, dozens of staffers of the agency went to the building for meetings with Trump officials. The invitation didn’t say who they would meet.
DOGE employees peppered them with questions about their job performance and who they believed were strong members of the USDS team—and who was not.
Earlier this week, 21 employees who had worked for the digital service before it was revamped into DOGE resigned, writing in a letter that they wouldn’t offer their expertise to overhaul the government if it meant undermining essential services. Leavitt said the administration welcomed the departure of “bureaucrats” who didn’t want to carry out Trump’s agenda.
At OPM’s nondescript headquarters a few minutes’ walk from the White House, DOGE workers have installed themselves on the fifth floor. They often arrive late in the day and stay late into the night. Security officers use printed photos to determine which career OPM staffers are allowed access to the inner sanctum, according to a former senior official at the agency.
Unfettered access
Even before Trump took office, Musk’s team identified OPM as central to its plans. His team moved swiftly to implement a plan that had been in the works for weeks to begin culling workers with the help of Ezell, the OPM official based in Georgia who was named acting director even though most senior officials there hadn’t heard of him.
Ezell said in a recent interview with a Presbyterian magazine that he received a call from one of Trump’s advisers a few months ago, which led to meetings with officials from the incoming administration. “All the sudden, I was offered the opportunity to serve as the acting director of OPM,” he said. “I humbly accepted.” OPM didn’t respond to a request for an interview with Ezell.
Days after accessing the computer systems on Jan. 20, DOGE programmers sent a test email to the federal workforce.
“OPM is testing a new capability allowing it to send important communications to ALL civilian federal employees from a single email address,” the agency said in a Jan. 23 email. Some government employees were concerned the unusual emails were spam or phishing attacks. The DOGE workers were stunned by how antiquated the government’s computer systems were and how difficult it was to accomplish seemingly simple tasks, according to a person familiar with their thinking.
Officials at OPM had warned such a vast email blast could unearth vulnerabilities to hacking efforts by foreign adversaries, exposing the personal information of federal employees. A decade ago, OPM was the target of a Chinese cyberattack that leaked sensitive information of thousands of government employees.
Career staff said they’re concerned about the sensitivity of the information DOGE programmers have accessed, including the health records, insurance and social security numbers of federal employees, beneficiaries and family members.
Soon after sending their test email, they sent an ultimatum to federal workers—quit now and get months of paid leave or face the possibility of getting fired. The message had the subject line “Fork in the Road”—the same subject line Musk had used in a 2022 email to Twitter employees shortly after he took over the company and renamed it X.
About 75,000 government employees took the offer, according to an OPM spokeswoman, about 3.5% of the civilian federal workforce, and short of its goal of a 5% to 10% reduction.
As DOGE programmers pushed for more access to OPM’s systems, some career staffers became worried. About a week after DOGE first arrived on the scene, some OPM staffers who objected to their activities were sidelined by Musk officials at the agency. One staffer said employees who made objections were deemed an “internal threat.”
In recent weeks, about nine DOGE workers have had administrative access to the agency’s computers, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. One DOGE programmer took control of OPM’s website, taking down diversity, equity and inclusion pages. In video chats with OPM staff, he didn’t turn his camera on.
OPM itself has faced a wave of layoffs. At 2 p.m. on Feb. 13, a group of OPM workers at the agency’s headquarters gathered. A half-hour later, Ezell, in a prerecorded video, informed them they were being terminated as of 3 p.m. “I know that this is not the outcome that you had hoped for, but I encourage you to use this as an opportunity for your next step forward,” Ezell said, according to a recording heard by the Journal.
Perhaps nowhere is DOGE’s aggressive approach more evident than the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, the 10,000-person, $40-billion foreign-assistance agency. Musk and top DOGE official Steve Davis, a leader of Musk’s Boring Co., have been driving the effort.
After the Trump administration implemented a funding freeze across the government, DOGE officials believed they saw funds continue to flow from USAID. On Jan. 27, DOGE officials met with USAID personnel at the department’s headquarters inside the Ronald Reagan Building seeking an explanation.
About 10 Trump and DOGE officials, including Davis, gathered around a table in a conference room, according to a person who attended the meeting.
The DOGE officials wanted to have the ability to track the payments. Two DOGE staffers were provided with laptops and given access to USAID’s computer systems. At the time, they were carrying multiple laptops from other agencies in their backpacks.
At one point, a USAID official asked them what they liked to read. One said he reads the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The other said he was reading about former President Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts.
At first, the two programmers were given read-only access to USAID’s financial management system, called Phoenix.
Federal workers terminated by DOGE fill Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office during a protest Tuesday.
Federal workers terminated by DOGE fill Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office during a protest Tuesday. Photo: shawn thew/EPA/Shutterstock
As the DOGE programmers kept demanding more access, one security official, seeking more information to provide clearance, asked them how they were getting paid. The pair responded they weren’t. They got the additional access they wanted, which let them lock people out of systems, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Meanwhile, others with DOGE moved to push out dozens of senior officials from USAID who they said continued to make unauthorized payments, this person said. USAID officials said the payments had previously been sent to the Treasury Department, which then forwarded the funds to recipients. No new payments from USAID had been made since the funding-freeze order, they said.
More DOGE programmers were given access to USAID. They had full administrative access to USAID’s systems and its website. They purged the agency and shut down programs. On Feb. 3, Musk posted on his social network, X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
The Trump administration has faced legal challenges for the USAID spending freeze. On Wednesday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily halted a judge’s requirement that the Trump administration resume nearly $2 billion in foreign-aid payments. Roberts gave aid organizations challenging the freeze until Friday to file their response.
Later DOGE would target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, an agency launched after the global financial crisis to provide safeguards to consumers against fraud and abuse.
On the evening of Thursday Feb. 6, DOGE members arrived at the CFPB’s headquarters in Washington. They directed the agency’s chief information officer to email CFPB staffers telling them to grant DOGE programmers access to the agency’s computer systems, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The following day, DOGE staffers set up shop in a conference room in the agency’s basement.
They had gained access to proprietary information about some of the biggest financial institutions in the country, the person familiar with the matter said. They also had access to details about consumers who’ve gone to the agency for assistance, the person added.
As DOGE gained access, alarm was rising within the agency. “I would like to express great concern at the level of access being requested and provided to the…DOGE team members today,” a CFPB email reviewed by the Journal said. The email requested a pause in providing access “before anyone proceeds with actions that may accidentally lead to data breaches, unintended access and other risks to the American public.”
That afternoon, about five DOGE programmers were seen in the halls of the building’s fourth floor, where top officials at the agency work. A CFPB official grew alarmed as the programmers began trying to open locked doors to offices and confronted them.
Over the weekend, the agency was effectively shut down. “CFPB RIP,” Musk posted on X.
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