Lambert here: This is an excellent interview, worth reading in full, that describes how Wired covered the DOGE beat (and kudos to them).
Earlier this month I spoke with Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of politics, science, and security (and, full disclosure, a close friend of mine), about what he and his colleagues have found looking behind the curtain at DOGE, and why a magazine founded to chronicle the dot-com boom and digital culture has managed to break so many stories about the inner workings of the federal government, often ahead of news outlets with larger staffs dedicated to covering politics and government in Washington, DC.
DOGE essentially took over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration through political appointments and special government employees being hired into the agencies and started dispatching people to other agencies—over 15 at this point. The typical route of entry would involve very young engineers, as young as 19, being onboarded with these agencies, demanding access to critical data and critical systems and immediately starting to schedule meetings with people in which they asked them what their jobs were, or what they’re doing. It’s basically these guys you have no idea who they are—in some cases they refuse to give their names—basically taking 15-minute meetings and demanding to know what you do and why you should continue to be employed.
The essence of it is that purportedly under the guise of finding operating efficiencies and searching through government databases for waste and fraud, you have this strike force within the government under the control of the richest man in the world, just going in, finding spending it doesn’t approve, and getting rid of it. The aim appears to be to just get rid of people who are doing anything besides statutorily obligated jobs, and to get rid of contracts and grants and spending that has been authorized by Congress but that conflicts with any number of priorities of the administration.
Lambert here: Alternatively, the “aim” was to exfiltrate as much data as possible. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
This is a purposefully naïve question, but what’s problematic about that kind access and control?
Another story we did recently was about the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There’s a six-person DOGE team there. Four of the people in it were preexisting employees who were detailed to it. Two were new hires, people from the private sector, one whose company says he’s expected back there this summer, and the other one who is still working at his current company, according to his LinkedIn—he’s the Chief Operating Officer of an AI property technology firm that has a proprietary model that forecasts how property values are going to rise or fall in certain ZIP codes. The firm says it’s on a “long term mission to aggregate the hardest to find data.”
And so these two guys, between them, have access to five really important HUD systems. In a couple of cases, read-write access. One of the systems basically traces all HUD spending. It’s like HUD’s banking program and attracts hundreds of billions of dollars in spending. Another one controls who within HUD has access to which systems at HUD—so you can, in theory, grant permissions using that system to give people access to data.
Lambert here: “Yo, Ed, did you bring the thumb drive?
Let’s back up and talk about why WIRED took the lead on this story in the first place. It’s not like WIRED suddenly started covering politics because of this election. But there’s something notably different about the way your reporting has come into the fore here. How did that happen?
Obviously, WIRED had covered politics before. But last year, Katie Drummond, our global editorial director, decided that—with the election coming up, and with the increase of Silicon Valley in DC as a locus of power and the increase in crossover between tech and politics—that we needed a team to cover that directly.
Lambert here: Ida Tarbell would be proud.
WIRED was clearly able to do that before anybody else really was able to, at least initially. How? Were people inside DOGE or the various agencies it was investigating more willing to talk to you? What made your reporting more effective than basically every other media organization, especially in the early stages?
I don’t want to talk about our reporting tactics. What we’ve reported speaks for itself. But I think pretty clearly we’ve been able to get access to sources within the government and documents that are generated within the government. And I think probably two things help with that. One is that we’ve been very clear about how to securely communicate with us, and we have a long track record of protecting people’s privacy and security.
And another thing is that, because we’re a technology publication, we have reporters who have covered technology and technology companies, who, even if they don’t specifically know a given system, know how to think about systems and can kind of grasp the significance of what they’re being told. In some cases, that helps us figure out what’s going on more easily than at places that are maybe more focused on electoral politics.
My colleague, Zoe Schiffer, who’s the director of our business coverage, she literally wrote the book on Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which is a direct parallel to what’s happening in government. He bought Twitter, he came in, he started firing people. He turned off parts of the systems that kept Twitter running, and some of them stopped working. It’s a very, very, very aggressive way of taking control of an enterprise and remaking it in your own image.
A lot of reporters doing this work are people who came up through places like Gawker and Vice and other non-traditional news sites. How do you think that prepared them to cover this crazy story?
I think that’s a really good point. We’ve got a lot of people here from Gizmodo, which was Gawker’s tech site, a fair number of people. And if you were at Gawker in particular, you take some of these powerful tech people very seriously and what they say and what their professed aims are, right? [Editor’s note: Gawker was bankrupted and shuttered in 2016 after being ordered to pay $140 million in a lawsuit brought by former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was bankrolled by Peter Thiel—a founder of Palantir and co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk—in apparent retribution for a 2007 Gawker article that outed Thiel as gay. Palantir is a data-analysis company with nearly $2.5 billion in federal government and defense contracts since 2009.]
Lambert here: The great Moe Tkacik, now Investigations Editor at The American Prospect, also came up through Gawker (Galatians 6:7Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.).
And so that’s one part of it. And another part of it is that people who have been in these digital media newsrooms over the last 15 years have seen these waves of private equity and venture capital take over their newsrooms in ways that have been pretty anti-labor; that probably gives them some insight into what people are going through in the federal government right now.
I’ve been in newsrooms where people you don’t know start coming in and asking everybody what they do in ways that make it clear they don’t think very highly of your enterprise or really care very much what your answers are. And I think that experience gives you some sense of what the overall patterns are, and where the places to start looking are, and what the right questions to ask are.