Lambert here: Good wrap-up. I tagged most everything, but included much less (nothing new, though the date of this story may be relevant). Strong on who was email accounts where. The piece is worth reading in full, especially for mid-February.
The staffing of DOGE has been hard to fully map out. DOGE has not released a full staff list, and a number of Musk’s aides have been secretive about their role.
In January, Musk announced that he was looking to hire unpaid “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” On DOGE’s website, it says that they are currently looking to hire paid, full-time “software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals.”
However, it is not clear how much DOGE staffers are currently paid, if all staffers are paid, or whether they are actual government employees.
In January, the Trump administration began offering federal workers the opportunity to accept “deferred resignation” offers… To accept the offer, federal workers have to simply respond with the word “resign” to an email that was sent out to all federal employees. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road,” has been used by Musk in a past email to Twitter employees…. He also had an art piece commissioned during that time titled, “A Fork in the Road” which he recently posted onto his X account.
The email was sent out to around 2 million federal employees, with DOGE members hoping for around 5-10% of workers to resign. The White House announced that 75,000 people accepted the “deferred resignation” offer — which is significantly below the typical annual attrition rate in the federal government.
At USAID, DOGE employees were successful in accessing some information systems, but it is unclear what information they were able to obtain from doing so.
On Feb. 11, USAID’s inspector general since 2023, Paul Martin, was fired after he released a report documenting the negative impacts of downsizing the agency.
In early February, DOGE accessed the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s payment system, which stores Social Security numbers and other confidential financial information. The DOGE staff at the Treasury included Tom Krause, who will become the department’s new financial assistant secretary, according to The Washington Post, and Marko Elez.
A handful of lawsuits were then filed claiming that DOGE employees’ access to Treasury Department’s data was violating federal privacy laws, and attorneys for the Department of Justice agreed to temporarily restrict DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s systems.
DOGE has been the subject of 12 different lawsuits.
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