Possibly the Doge interviews of USDS personnel were start-up style?
[Merici Vinton] said DOGE representatives wearing temporary badges and identifying themselves by only their first names conducted 15-minute interviews with the agency’s 162 employees the next day. Those questions included some unusual queries about “what makes you exceptional” and “who’s your favorite person” working at the agency.
“It didn’t really feel like a serious set of questions,” she said. “You know, the work that we do can be really hard and really complex. And these questions were … kind of random, didn’t really feel like they were going to meet a complexity of the work that we do.”
Opaque leadership:
Vinton said she isn’t sure who is actually leading DOGE on a day-to-day basis.
She said she never met Musk, and that Amy Gleason, the agency’s acting administrator, “made clear to us that she was overseeing more of the USDS legacy work and not calling the shots elsewhere.”
Gleason started running USDS’ daily meetings after the mass purge of Vinton’s colleagues in mid-February, but the staff received no formal announcement that she was named acting administrator, even after the media reported the appointment based on White House sources.
Opaque lines of authority:
Some of Vinton’s work was at the IRS, and she had a view into how the DOGE team was operating there. She observed the operatives embedded at that agency — who were often young and had no government experience — to be “highly empowered, as individuals, to make decisions and to determine their activities day-to-day.”
“I never understood who they, you know, were necessarily reporting into, other than … Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent,” she said. “It was very unclear to me who was ultimately calling those shots.”
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