On January 20, as President Donald Trump was signing an executive order formally establishing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative he had publicly tasked billionaire Elon Musk to run, the mood from some inside the government was one of cautious optimism.
Trump’s order, among the first he signed after taking office for the second time, codified DOGE by renaming the United States Digital Service to be the U.S. DOGE Service, situating Trump and Musk’s signature initiative squarely within the Executive Office of the President.
Created in 2014 in the wake of the botched launch of the Affordable Care Act online health insurance marketplace, USDS has since grown to become one of the most unique and lauded offices within the government, connecting private sector technologists with agency leaders throughout the federal workforce to solve IT problems and, according to its mission statement, “deliver better government services to the American people.”
So it made sense to many USDS staffers, then, that DOGE would land at USDS. Since Trump’s election, several had already speculated that would be the case, given the two projects’ shared focus on leveraging private sector experience to drive technology improvements.
“I thought that if they were smart, they would work with USDS because of the history that USDS has with the different federal agencies,” one former employee told Scripps News. “If they were actually honest about wanting to make improvements, USDS knows exactly where to focus on.”
“In many ways, the new folks look like us,” echoed a current USDS staffer. “There's a lot of similarities and there's reasons for cautious optimism. And so even if there are differences in like political outlook and things like that, there are plenty of things that USDS works on that could benefit from their outlook.”
But despite that optimism, officials say their hopes were soon dashed by a realization that DOGE’s goals and those of USDS were not actually the same. Indeed, the sources said, it became abundantly clear that, in the words of another former employee, “USDS is just a vessel, they just wanted the container.”
“They wanted the email address, they wanted the proximity to the White House — literally, physically, digitally,” the former employee continued. “We were just a convenient place for them.”
For this investigation, Scripps News spoke with five former and two current USDS staffers and consulted former Biden administration technology officials, outside experts and hundreds of pages of court records. Their stories paint a picture of an office that’s now a shell of what it used to be, with long-running projects brought to a screeching halt by DOGE officials focused solely on cuts to government programs.
Most USDS staffers requested anonymity to speak candidly about what they’d seen inside the White House without fear of retribution from the Trump administration. All of them described chaos and confusion in the wake of DOGE’s takeover, pointing to a leadership vacuum, siloed communication and mass firings throughout their teams.
Many who weren’t fired quit, feeling they had no other recourse: upwards of 160 employees were working at USDS at the start of the Trump administration, sources said; as of March 14, just 79 dedicated employees remained.
DOGE’s takeover “did, in effect, change us from these nonpartisan technical experts into a political vehicle,” said Itir Cole, a technologist who worked with USDS on health care software improvements until last month, when she resigned.
“That, to me, changed the job,” Cole added. “Ultimately, that's not what I had signed up for.”
What is USDS?
When President Barack Obama first established the USDS in August of 2014, Americans’ perceptions of government technology were at an all-time low.
Healthcare.gov, the new website promised to streamline Americans’ ability to navigate the health insurance marketplace, was a laughingstock, plagued by widespread delays, a faulty design and incorrect or incomplete data syncing with insurance companies.
“I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first,” comedian Jon Stewart famously joked to then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in a 2013 TV interview.
Over a decade later, having long solved the marketplace debacle, USDS has worked on technology projects across dozens of federal agencies, seeking to make the government faster and more responsive to its citizens.
The new IRS pilot program where Americans can file their taxes for free online — USDS designed it. The State Department tool letting applicants track their passport renewals in real-time — it's a USDS project. The CDC site connecting Americans to COVID-19 vaccines during the height of the pandemic — USDS engineers also made it happen.
“The idea was to work on other things that were equally broken [to healthcare.gov] and, hopefully, have an equal amount of success in fixing them in a short time,” recalled Mikey Dickerson, USDS’s first administrator who left his job at Google to oversee the new project and recruit mid-to-senior level technologists and engineers to the government.
Signing onto such roles almost always meant accepting significant pay cuts, employees said, but, as one former staffer put it, “at some point, the techies get tired of getting rich and making pizzas get delivered faster, and they wanted to work on actual, real problems to help improve and save lives.”
As recently as the Biden administration, USDS was seen as a signature example of government innovation done right.
“It was just such a cool example of people coming in with experience from outside government but coming to serve the American public, not to serve some personal interest,” said Dr. Arati Prabhakar, who served as President Joe Biden’s chief science advisor and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“To watch DOGE take it over, to see a whole host of USDS individuals leave out of great concern for the DOGE group coming in, that was a really huge red flag,” Prabhakar added.
'A loyalty test’
USDS sources say the first warning signs came the evening after Trump’s inauguration, when all USDS employees received an email instructing them to sign up for 15-minute interview slots the following day with representatives from the new DOGE team.
The directive came out of the blue and from an unknown email address, employees said, prompting some to wonder whether it was real or some sort of phishing attack.
Once on the calls, employees recalled facing a barrage of questions from two and sometimes three DOGE staffers — mostly white men in their 20s, irking the more senior USDS staffers, many of whom had decades of experience. The DOGE employees declined to provide their last names, sources added, telling those who asked that the conversation was “one-sided.”
Further complicating matters was a lack of discussion about what security clearances, if any, the DOGE interviewers had. USDS employees said they feared disclosing information DOGE officers might not be qualified to hear, as concerns about DOGE’s handling of sensitive information persist.
“I asked him, like, ‘Hey, do you have a Top Secret security clearance, or any public trust security clearance, or, really anything? Like, are you cleared at all? Are you a federal employee?,’” one USDS staffer recalled of her interview. “The response was: ‘This is a one-way interview.’”
Other USDS employees said the DOGE officials' questions did not inspire confidence about DOGE’s efforts.
“It didn't feel very serious to me,” a different former USDS staffer said. “There's no way to assess somebody's ability to launch a product like Direct File when they asked, ‘What makes you exceptional?’ or ‘What is your favorite thing that you've done in government?’ Like, that's not actually a way to assess my ability to do my job.”
Sources also recalled being asked pointed questions about their USDS teammates: who they liked the most, who they didn’t like and who they thought might not be worth keeping on. Employees expressed severe discomfort at being asked to judge their colleagues, worried — rightly — that their comments would be used to justify future cuts.
“At no point did they ask about the outcome of our work or the impact of our work on the American people,” Cole recalled. “It was more about understanding political ideology and loyalty.”
“It really did feel like some sort of loyalty test, and it didn't feel like there was an answer we could give that would be satisfactory,” another former employee noted.
'Full transparency'
When questioned about DOGE’s efforts, the project’s leaders have pointed to its alleged transparency as a pushback to critics.
“You know what's better than saying ‘trust me’ is just full transparency,” Musk said in an interview about DOGE on Fox News last month. “Just go to DOGE.gov. You can see every single action that's being taken.”
That website does indeed host a so-called “wall of receipts” detailing tens of billions of dollars DOGE purports to have saved the federal government. Yet those savings appear to be off by significant margins, with DOGE taking credit for cancelling already-defunct contracts, double- and triple-counting savings and in at least one case suggesting billions of dollars of savings when the contract was only worth millions.
Behind the scenes, DOGE officials have taken a number of steps to obfuscate their work. Legal filings show that DOGE employees have been communicating on Signal, a private, encrypted messaging app, and are alleged to have set up a private email server separate from the one used by the government.
Trump’s order establishing DOGE conspicuously moved the USDS from being housed under the Office of Management and Budget — where it’s been organized since its inception — to reporting directly to the White House chief of staff. USDS officials said no explanation for the reorganization was given, but in practice, it’s enabled the government to claim USDS and DOGE are no longer bound by the Freedom of Information Act’s public records requirements.
"USDS sits within the Executive Office of the President, and the USDS Administrator reports to the President’s Chief of Staff,” an unnamed DOGE officer wrote on March 6 in response to a FOIA request by the ethics watchdog CREW. “USDS is subject to the Presidential Records Act... and is not subject to FOIA. We therefore decline your request.”
At least three lawsuits concerning requests for DOGE records are pending at the federal level, and one judge has ordered DOGE to comply with FOIA requests — prompting government officials to claim they’re unable to do so as it would force them to “create a FOIA operation from scratch.”
“The Court has faith that the employees of a government organization charged with ‘modernizing Federal technology and software,’ who have reportedly gained access to databases and payment systems across federal agencies, are technologically sophisticated enough to perform these basic tasks,” Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in response.
The White House declined to respond to questions about the reasoning for USDS’s reorganization, and if shielding DOGE from public records requests had any impact on that decision. Government officials have since acknowledged in a court filing that upwards of 100,000 documents could be shared were the office required to respond to the FOIA request.
USDS employees, meanwhile, say the move makes clear that the digital service of old is no more.
“When they moved the USDS entity out of OMB and elevated it to the broader Executive Office of the President, they basically changed the transparency and what they can share,” a former employee said. “USDS is no more. There is now DOGE.”
‘A vacuum of leadership’
Among the many questions surrounding DOGE remains a simple one: who leads the project?
Though the president has publicly stated multiple times that Elon Musk is heading the effort, the Trump administration continues to contend in court that Musk has no actual authority over DOGE or USDS, claiming he serves only as an adviser to the president with no powers to direct specific actions.
“Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration, wrote in a legal declaration in February. “Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President's directives.”
Yet White House officials repeatedly declined to answer questions about who was running DOGE, telling reporters they wanted to preserve the employee’s privacy. That was until February 25, when press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that Amy Gleason, a health care technology executive with previous experience at USDS, was serving as the office’s acting administrator. Subsequent court filings have revealed Gleason is simultaneously detailed to HHS, despite declaring in a sworn statement for a separate case that she works “full time” at USDS.
Current and former USDS employees, however, question the veracity of the White House’s claim.
Multiple sources confirmed that Gleason was on vacation in Mexico on the day the White House announced her DOGE leadership position. USDS employees say they were never told she was leading their office prior to that announcement, and when Gleason did participate in USDS meetings, she made no mention of her acting administrator position. Several speculated Gleason didn’t learn of her new role until shortly before the White House named her publicly.
“She was on these calls, she was on camera, she was paying attention. She’d, like, nod her head every once in a while,” a former staffer said. “But she not once said anything on leadership or staff meeting calls. So I never got the impression that she was the admin[istrator].”
In fact, USDS sources say the lack of clarity about who was leading their work was a key driver of the chaos they felt after the inauguration. Ted Carstensen, the deputy administrator during the Biden administration, served as acting administrator until he left the service on February 6. After that, despite the many questions employees had about their work and whether they still had jobs, staffers said they had no one to turn to.
“There was a vacuum of leadership,” Cole said. “The DOGE operatives continued separately on their work, and anything we were doing was based on inertia continued from the last administration.”
The confusion spilled over to DOGE officials themselves, who despite being siloed off from the original USDS team, apparently were faced with some of the same questions. One former USDS employee who was detailed to the Office of Management and Budget told Scripps News she received an inquiry from a DOGE staffer about who was overseeing his pay and benefits.
The employee said she told the DOGE employee the same thing she’d told her colleagues: I have no idea.
“It was just a shit show,” the former staffer recalled.
And yet, there were growing signs of Musk’s influence over the DOGE effort, sources said. Top Musk aides Steve Davis and Brad Smith sat in on meetings and met independently with some USDS officials even in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. At one point, a draft document seen by a former USDS official listed Smith as the acting administrator of the agency, though his name was removed before the document was shared publicly.
Asked about USDS leadership, a White House official declined to comment.
And while the government attests that Musk has no role in directing policy, the billionaire did set up a makeshift office inside the Secretary of War room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building where he was hosting interviews for DOGE staff, one source recalled.
The few still at USDS, meanwhile, say major trust deceits persist.
“I would say that [Gleason] doesn't currently have a lot of trust from the USDS classic people,” a current employee said. “And she may be in the situation where she also doesn't have a lot of trust from the DOGE side people.”
“There's not a lot of actual USDS left,” a former employee conceded. “I don't know who of the original USDSers remain, or what they're gonna be working on or if they'll even be trusted. It was like a hostile takeover.”
'The end of the digital service movement’
Beyond the firings and the obfuscating and the short-term impacts to government technology projects, USDS sources and technology experts have a bigger concern: what happens when crucial government systems just stop working?
“There really is this sort of uniqueness or difference between the public sector and the private sector when we think about technology,” said Dr. Sara Hinkley, a program manager with UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools who’s studied how technology functions in the public sector.
“How do you set up a Social Security Agency, an incredibly complex system, that's responsible for getting benefits to everybody in which mistakes can be really damaging to people?” Hinkley posed. “We've all bought faulty products and so forth. That's very different from, you know, ‘Grandpa doesn't get his Social Security checks for a few months, and now he's lost his housing.’”
The projects since-fired USDS employees were working on impacted major domestic and international concerns: CDC disease tracking programs, child tax credit payment systems, and veterans’ health care access portals. While DOGE officials claim government savings by eliminating federal employees, USDS staff fear severe disruptions to Americans’ lives.
“We had incredible momentum. We were on the precipice of, like, building things that were going to make the next public health emergency either preventable or better,” said an employee who works on public health projects with USDS and CDC.
“What has happened is disruption, and in my experience, a complete halt to productivity. From the time the inauguration happened to the mass firings, and even until this moment where I'm communicating with folks who are still left in federal government, productivity is at a standstill,” echoed Cole, who worked on similar projects. “If their goal was ‘efficiency,’ I'm not sure they’re achieving that.”
Prabhakar, the Biden administration technology official, acknowledged that different administrations might take different approaches to government technology projects. But she said DOGE’s mass cuts serve no logical purpose.
“Democrats and Republicans have spent many years arguing about how to remodel the house, right? But now what we're talking about is people who are taking a blowtorch to the house. This is not how we make progress,” she said.
In the long term, officials fear DOGE’s haphazard process will serve to destroy any trust USDS had built with federal agencies and deter service-oriented technologists from joining the government -- if the USDS even exists after Trump leaves office.
“I think this is probably the end of the digital service movement, and it's going to have set us back, like, at least 10 years,” a former USDS employee said.
Some acknowledged missteps in how the service operated thus far, suggesting the office could have done a better job highlighting its successes to the American people.
“USDS projects, very intentionally, tend to get credited to the agencies we're working with. So if you read about Direct File, what you'll read is, ‘This is an IRS project. The IRS built the thing,’” the person said. “The reality is the initial team was all USDS people.”
But now, with most USDS staff fired or pushed out, the sense from current and former employees is that such changes are too little, too late.
“So many of the systems and technology in the government are literally held together by duct tape,” a former USDS employee said. “Sometimes that duct tape is in the form of people. And so when you remove the people, the whole thing falls apart.”
