At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a senior official warned employees in an email that virtual meetings were being secretly recorded. Anyone dissatisfied with Donald Trump’s decisions should be careful about voicing their opinions, the official cautioned.
Over at the state department, IT staff said new monitoring software has been loaded onto computers. Some staffers have started using white noise machines in their offices, or have even turned on an office breakroom sink, to muffle conversations in case there might be any hot mics within range.
A supervisor at one water management organization that works closely with the Environmental Protection Agency sent a warning to staffers that their meetings and phone calls with the agency were being monitored by an artificial intelligence tool.
Anecdotes like these are rife among federal employees now, amid fears that senior agency leaders or agents from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” may be snooping on conversations, using software to track computer activity and, possibly, using artificial intelligence to scan for disloyalty or mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) buzzwords. Many fear losing their jobs, as thousands already have.
“It’s like being in a horror film where you know something out there [wants] to kill you but you never know when or how or who it is,” one employee from the US Department of Housing & Urban Development said.
These details arise from conversations with more than two dozen federal employees who spoke with the Guardian and Crooked Media’s What A Day newsletter, and shared emails from agency officials and screengrabs.
Trump political appointees have told EPA managers that Musk’s team is implementing AI to monitor workers and look for disparaging comments about Trump or Musk, according to a Reuters report.
At the now-shuttered US Agency for International Development (USAID), employees said they discovered that their private communications were being monitored by leadership who arrived after Trump’s inauguration, prompting staff to abandon official channels altogether.
“They went into our chats, like our private group chats,” said a former USAID employee who lost their position during the mass firing wave in February. “It was [Acting Administrator] Jason Gray, not Doge directly. But he was put in place when they fired everybody” because he knew the systems well.
The intrusions became so blatant that Gray – who was also the agency’s chief information officer – suddenly appeared in one group chat with over 40 contractors.
“We knew they were watching,” the former USAID employee, who was in the chat, said. “Everybody went on either Signal or WhatsApp because nobody was trusting [leadership] at that point.”
“We’re turning on sinks and shit to have conversations,” they added. “It’s really funny to think about the Dogebags sitting there, watching and learning in real time, that the ‘deep state’ is really a bunch of goobers just doing our boring jobs for middling pay.”
Lambert here: I at one point tried to propagate “Dogebag,” and here it is. I’m so pleased.
“They are just so omnipresent and the work environment is so toxic and hostile, it feels like anything is possible,” a former senior education department official said about the potential for surveillance.
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