Home Tech DOGE will allow Elon Musk to monitor the US government from the inside

DOGE will allow Elon Musk to monitor the US government from the inside

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DOGE will allow Elon Musk to monitor the US government from the inside

According to the executive order, DOGE teams, which “will typically include a DOGE team leader, an engineer, a human resources specialist, and an attorney,” will be sent to multiple agencies. They will be granted “access to all agency records, software systems, and unclassified IT systems,” apparently with the goal of streamlining data sharing between federal agencies.

A former USDS employee who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity called the repurposing of the Digital Service an “A+ bureaucratic jiu-jitsu move.” But, they say, they are concerned that DOGE’s access to sensitive information could be used to do more than just streamline government operations.

“Will this technical talent be used to use federal government data to track down his opponents?” they ask. “Track particular populations of interest to this administration for the purpose of targeting them or targeting them or whatever it may end up being?”


Do you have advice?

Are you a current or former employee of US Digital Services or another government agency affected by DOGE? We would like to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, contact Vittoria Elliott at vittoria_elliott@wired.com or securely at velliott88.18 on Signal.


It seems, however, that the first DOGE order is to eliminate people in agencies who could set back the Trump administration’s agenda, starting with existing USDS staffand hire new people.

“DOGE teams have a lawyer, a human resources director and an engineer. If you were looking to identify roles to eliminate, people to eliminate, having an HR director there and an attorney saying, ‘This is what we can do or not do,’ would be a way to make it easier.” says Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, noting that DOGE’s potential access to federal employees’ data could put them “in sort of a crosshairs for firing.”

When Musk took over Twitter, he asked for outside help from his close circle as well as his other companies to transform the company, a movement that seems to be repeating.

Who exactly is going to be part of DOGE is a particularly thorny issue because there are technically two DOGE. One is the permanent organization, the renewed USDS, now the US DOGE Service. The other is a temporary organization, with a termination date of July 4, 2026. The creation of this organization means that the temporary DOGE can operate under a special set of rules. It can kidnap employees from other parts of the government and can also accept people who want to work for the government as volunteers. Temporary organizations can also hire what are known as special government employees: experts in a given field who can avoid the rigors of regular federal hiring processes. They are also not subject to the same transparency requirements as other government employees.

Ideally, this would allow DOGE to act quickly to address issues and accelerate the necessary talent, as well as build systems that make government services more seamless by facilitating the flow of information and data. But in the worst case, this could mean less transparency around the interests of people working on important government projects, while also allowing for potential surveillance.

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