Tech Won't Save Us - How DOGE is Remaking the US Government w/ Makena Kelly

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Makena Kelly to discuss how Elon Musk’s DOGE is reshaping the US government and the consequences that has for government employees and the wider public.Makena Kelly is a senior writer at WIRED and writes the weekly Politics Lab newsletter.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Makena wrote about how DOGE is replacing government IT roles and also the COBOL Cowboys back in 2020.Support the show

If you take down Social Security and you can't get it back up, if you take down the Treasury Department, people can literally die. Like if you do not get it up in time, they cannot make their rent payment. They cannot pay for electricity. They cannot do these things. Like this is not something that we're like, oh, sorry, site's down for a couple hours. We'll have it back up. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is McKenna Kelly. McKenna is a senior writer at Wired and writes the Politics Lab newsletter that covers

everything that we have been seeing on a weekly basis. As I said on last week's episode, I was on vacation for a little while. That's why we weren't digging into the day-to-day of what has been going on with the remaking of the U.S. government by Silicon Valley. But today, we changed that by talking to McKenna. As you might be aware, Wired has been doing fantastic reporting on everything that DOGE, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, has been doing within the U.S. government and the wider effects of that on the federal workforce, but also on the government as a whole and, you know, everyone who relies on it. So I figured it was a great opportunity to have McKenna on the show so we could dig into all this. And we really go through so many different aspects of it. Just

the intensity of the changes that are happening within the U.S. government, how this Doge agency actually works and how that differs from maybe this initial idea that was behind it, who is actually running this thing and how much power Elon Musk actually has and how it can actually be a bit difficult to figure out what exactly they are doing because they are doing a lot of things in secret and trying to avoid, you know, freedom of information requests and those sorts of things. And then we end by talking about what has actually been going on at Wired and how they have been doing the great reporting that they have been doing over the past number of weeks to get this story out to people and so that people actually understand what is happening to the U.S. government right now.

You might notice through this conversation that we do use a number of acronyms. I've tried to make sure that we actually say what the agency is before we start using the acronyms because obviously the U.S. government is a big sprawling thing and there are a lot of different parts of it. You might hear us refer to the GSA, which is the General Services Administration, or the OPM, which is the Office of Personnel Management, as well as the DOE, the Department of Energy, or the CFPB, which is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Throughout the conversation, you'll hear me ask McKenna what these agencies actually do, So you'll have a better understanding of that. But I just wanted to lay out some of the key abbreviations that we use before we actually get into the conversation.

So, you know, hopefully it helps you kind of keep track of what we're talking about. I think the one final thing I would say before we get into this conversation is that it has really been stunning just to see the speed and the intensity with which Doge and, you know, Elon Musk have attacked the U.S. government and really sought to quickly remake it. You know, I think so far we have been seeing some of the low-hanging fruit for them to be able to go after, right? Things that maybe haven't fully affected a ton of people in the United States yet, but as Elon Musk talks about Social Security and Medicare and these larger programs that are going to impact a lot more people, it will be

interesting to see if his remaking of the U.S. government and the Trump administration more broadly start to experience more pushback for this attempted remaking of the U.S. government and this attempt to cut so much of the U.S. federal government, or whether they will be able to continue proceeding despite opposition, despite court rulings, and what is actually going to happen in the United States, not just over the next few months, but over the next number of years. So obviously, I will be keeping an eye on what is happening. We won't be discussing this every single week, but if I feel that there is a development that is worthy of discussion on the show, I will have someone else on and we will discuss it and we will go through it. So you can have a proper understanding of what is going on,

not just in the United States, but the broader impacts that this is going to have for a whole lot of people around the world as well. So if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can continue to keep on top of what Silicon Valley is doing in this really key moment as they are trying to transform not just the United States, but surely other governments and other political systems as well. You can join supporters like Thomas from San Diego, Lo in Stockholm, Dipro from Singapore, Donald in East Lansing, and Ryan from the UK by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us,

where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. McKenna, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I'm really excited to have you on the show. You and your colleagues at Wired have been doing fantastic work for the past three weeks and before, of course, as well, covering the Silicon Valley's takeover of the U.S. government and everything that has been happening here. And of course, that is why I wanted to have you on the show to dig into all this to try to understand what is happening.

With that said, it seems like so much has happened in just the past three weeks, the speed and intensity of this assault on the U.S. government, in particular by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Like, what have you made of it all? It has been one thing after another for the past several weeks now. And, you know, at first, when we heard about DOGE last year, Department of Government Efficiency, it sounded like this is going to be some outside advisory council, right? Like this is going to be Elon Musk and at the time Vivek Ramaswamy sitting in a room telling like the administrative state what to cut. Yeah, he disappeared pretty quickly, Vivek, after some tweets. Yeah, he's like gone. He hasn't said anything now, which honestly makes me want to go check in on him. Hope he's okay. Hope he's alive. We'll hear about his governor run anytime now. Yeah, yeah. So Doge was supposed to like it's mandate in the executive order that Trump signed his first state office as soon as he got done with the pomp and circumstance of the inauguration day,

right? He signed this executive order mandating Doge to cut waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government. And so for that first week, we didn't really see too much of what Doge was actually doing because I think they were still kind of getting things set up. But as we got to the second week of the administration, things started to hit the fan. And so we started seeing them infiltrate a bunch of different government agencies, which with all the news that's happened recently, news me and my colleagues have been breaking it wired. It has been an entirely different story than what we originally expected. Yeah, for sure. And we'll dig into a lot of those details. But I wanted to talk a bit about the agency itself, right? Because as you were saying, this was initially positioned as like this outside

group that was going to be providing advice to the government, or at least, you know, that's what it seemed like to the Trump administration. But then on the first day in office, you know, this order was signed, basically taking over the U.S. Digital Service and turning it into Doge or the U.S. Doge Service, as I believe it's officially called. How did that change what this agency actually was and what it was like expected to do? Yeah. So now having taken over USDS, Doge is an executive like level group. It has a lot of authority and a lot of ways that it can flex its muscle. The USDS was created in Obama's first term in office, I believe, because if anyone remembers, healthcare.gov was a shit show. It was constantly going down. It was a mess. And so this was an idea to bring a ton of private sector technologists into government to make government, well, look at

this, listen to this, work more efficiently for the people. The similarities, but a very different approach, right? Exactly. And so what we've gotten now, he's taken this over. USDS, it is basically like a tech task force for the federal government. Some agency needs some new product or to ship some kind of new whatever system for something. They can tap into USDS, bring those folks over to them, and then they'll work on that project. It's kind of the same way the healthcare.gov stuff worked. And so they have a lot of breadth and a lot of reach across government because of that in their authorities. And so they have a lot of access. And I think, you know, Doge saw that, saw that it was already staffed with a ton of qualified people that as of Valentine's Day, Friday, there hasn't been any cuts at Doge

or USDS specifically, because there's a lot of talented folks over there doing this work. The people that I'm speaking to still feel as if the axe is going to fall at some point. They have this widespread authority and they're using it. And I think another important thing is now that they are in the EOP, the Executive Office of the President, almost everything they touch is now like a presidential record, which makes it incredibly the President, almost everything they touch is now like a presidential record, which makes it incredibly hard to FOIA what they do. It wouldn't surprise me if that was also intentional. Interesting. And of course, FOIA, for people who aren't aware, would be the Freedom of Information Act, basically for journalists and other organizations to be able

to get access to this information through submitting these freedom of information requests. What I have been reading is that because they took over the USDS, the US Digital Service, that Doge now has access to a lot of different departments across government. It gave it this wide-reaching authority or access right from the beginning rather than having to build something up from scratch. Does that sound about right? So beyond the power at USDS Doge, Elon Musk affiliates have been installed across government at this point. There's a General Services Administration, which deals with government buildings, leases, procurement, all kinds of stuff. And within that is a group of 700 technologists at the Technology Transformation Services, which is similar to USDS in some ways. But the new director for that is a former Tesla engineer. And I got audio from a meeting,

one of the first meetings that he had with this TTS staff, where he starts saying that the GSA wants to turn TTS and GSA into this AI first strategy agency. They want to deploy AI. They want to make TTS literally, quote, look like a startup software company. Like that is the vision for this, right? What we're seeing is just like a bunch of people with this same kind of Silicon Valley mindset, not just being at Doge and USDS, but also finding their way into other agencies across government. Yeah. And this seems like a really key story as well, right? Not just how Doge has this authority, has the support of the president, but is increasingly moving into other agencies across the U.S. government or departments. At Wired, you and

your colleagues have been reporting about kind of this slow movement or quite rapid movement into these different parts of the U.S. government. You know, you mentioned the General Services Administration. There's also the Office of Personnel Management, these really key parts of the US government that have wide-ranging authority and power throughout the US government and how these people from Musk-affiliated and often Peter Thiel-affiliated companies have been being established there. What does that tell us about what is actually happening within the US government and the remaking that is occurring there? Well, first off, it's not even just this authority and control, but it's an incredible amount of sensitive data as well. I have talked to so many federal workers who know that Elon Musk's

crew have access to their social security numbers. They're saying they're scared that they have all of their next of kin, all of this stuff, and they're afraid it could at some point be weaponized against them, which is terrifying. But yes, so these folks are being installed in all kinds of different places. Another important role is the chief information officer role, which sounds really boring. And it was a very boring office for maybe throughout the 2010s, etc. But now it's kind of become the chief technology officer role of the government. So not only are you dealing with like the government networks and security and safety, but from my reporting and from talking to people like these people hold the keys and permissions to all of these sensitive systems,

and it's sometimes classified databases. They are the people who open and shut the door to those who are supposed to have access. And these people who are getting put in these agencies are, I think it's fair to say, incredibly inexperienced, at least in government. You have Marco Alez, who is one of these 20-year-old Doge interns who was at Treasury, who was mistakenly, the White House says, given right access to the entire Treasury payment system, which I was speaking to someone at the AFL-CIO who represents tech workers in government. And what they told me was like, these systems, especially at Treasury, are all clobbered together. This is like decades and decades of systems from mainframes to contemporary computing that we know now, right? And the people who have worked on these systems know them very well. And even when they deploy

simple changes, they'll like try it out in separate instances, right? To make sure nothing breaks. Because if something breaks, what this person at AFL-CIO told me was it could take months to fix. And that is if you have all of the staff, right, who know how to use this. Now, imagine if all those people get fired, and you just have the Marco Alezes and best read of this possible, these folks, these Doge guys could be Wunderkind. They could be genius coders, right? The Luke Ferretor kid from UNL, which is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I'm from Lincoln, so I know where he comes from, who was able to read these ancient Pompeii decrepit scrolls, right, with AI. That is actually very cool. That is a very cool project. Does that convert to government? I'm not entirely sure, right? And so even if they are these geniuses, these boy geniuses, they don't understand these ancient archaic systems that the government operates off of. And probably don't have an interest in doing so as well, right? You think

of these old COBOL systems that have these engineers who have been with the government for decades and decades who know how to run them. And, you know, we saw in previous crises how state level governments and stuff like that were looking for people who would be able to run these COBOL systems because, you know, the talent that can actually do that is so limited right now. And there's so few like new people coming into the system who actually understand how this works. There's a group called the Kobol Cowboys who find these people because they're so hard to find. And that's where like if you are a state unemployment system, which a lot of these unemployment systems cave during COVID, right?

If you are trying to find people to work on these, you contact the Kobol Cowboys because they are like the networking system for this. These folks are very, very hard to find. I love that. And I already saw some suggestion that apparently COBOL is confusing the Doge kids who are going into these different agencies and things like that, right? Surprising. Yeah. Yeah. Not really understanding how these systems are working. There's also like this assumption, right, that comes along with a lot of this push into the government by Silicon Valley in particular that like, why would these old systems still be around, right? Why would these outdated, decrepit technologies still be being used? Why isn't everything just updated to like

the latest digital technology, the latest form of computing? Why isn't AI infused into everything? And there's just this assumption that, of course, everything should be modernized, that there's no reason to have these old systems, even though, yes, I'm sure that to a certain degree, there's a lack of funding to upgrade certain things. But at the same time, I'm sure if systems are working well, then there might be a reason to keep them around too. Well, also, it's not just that, you know, if they're working well, then you need to keep them. They can always work better. I think it's fair to say that modernization needs to hit the government at a faster rate. Everyone has a bad story with like Medicaid, Medicare,

calling the IRS, calling something like this stuff needs to be fixed. The thing is, is that you are deploying people who have this Silicon Valley mindset of like, okay, if we break something, then the site goes down for a couple hours, no one like dies, right? And then we just put it back up again. Whereas like, if you take down Social Security, and you can't get it back up, if you take down the Treasury Department, people can literally die. Like if you do not get it up in time, they cannot make their rent payment. They cannot pay for electricity. They cannot do these things. This is not something that we're like, oh, sorry, site's down for a couple hours. We'll have it back up. These are extremely, extremely important things. And when you don't have people in government who understand

that, these young kids, they're not thinking about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security payments. Maybe we can chop it up to them with a little bit of ignorance, but it's the folks around them that should know better. It's clear that they don't. Yeah. The Elon Musk's and his higher up executives that he is bringing in to do these things as well, not just the young doge kids just out of university or just out of high school in some instances, right? You mentioned the CIO roles, the chief information officer roles. And I believe it is in a story that you wrote that I was reading that, you know, these are typically like longtime bureaucrats that are in these types of positions. It's a nonpartisan role. But all of a sudden, with this transformation, it is becoming

something that, you know, there's a role that's being appointed, that is explicitly trying to do what the president and what Doge wants to happen. Like, how does that change how this administration of these different agencies works? Yeah. Like I said, CIOs were traditionally incredibly boring and now they are becoming some of the most important roles in government. Some CIO roles have always been traditionally appointees. There is an appointee who is the federal CIO right now with, I think he had a 10-year stint at Palantir before joining and doing this. But most CIO roles are like you said, career civil servants. They're the highest civil servant you can get basically

in that kind of same role before you start having to be a political appointee. And they hold the keys to all of these systems. There are complex systems of permissions, right, too, in order for folks to get into whatever it is that they think that they're supposed to get into, too. But what's happened is Trump signed an executive order, A, trying to make it easier to fire civil servants because there are civil servant protections in the United States. Paired with that, OPM issued a memorandum requiring all federal agencies that currently employ CIOs that are civil servants to turn those into general positions, opening them up for political appointments. So what we're seeing now, and if this goes in the direction that we're seeing it happening, they could fire CIOs that don't give Elon Musk the access that he asks for, right? And then replace them with some kind of political appointee. I think the deadline for that at OPM to make those changes was Friday the 14th. And so we'll see if anyone gets those letters back saying that it happened. These huge transformations, right? And there's so much happening that it can be difficult to keep track of everything. I wanted to backtrack just for a minute.

You know, we mentioned the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. Can you talk about how important these agencies are and what they actually do within the U.S. government? Yeah. GSA, another traditionally boring agency, right? Who handles leases, procurement, and then also does things like, if you need to interface with the government, TTS might have touched all of that. If you're a veteran and you're trying to seek healthcare, I think you

use login.gov. There's cloud.gov. There's all these consumer- systems and GSA has its tentacles in all of those, right? And again, it's one of those things like what I was pointing out with Treasury going down with one little slip up. If you have one person messing around in there, right, that doesn't understand what they're doing, something can break. All of a sudden veterans can't access their healthcare system. They can't do all these things. And so it's crazy because it's very clear now that we're so many weeks out from the starting that the epicenter of the Doge blast was USDS GSA, because they've learned this and it's incredibly smart that if you have access to the computers in government, you have control of government.

If you control the computers, you control the government. And so they hit the two pillars of government technologists who have so much widespread access is USDS and TTS. And they got there. And now we're seeing, I said that that was the epicenter of the blast. And I keep using the same metaphor, but the radius is expanding. That was the epicenter. Now we're seeing it hitting CFPB. We're seeing it hitting, I'm hearing CDC recently, Department of Energy, Department of Education. It is just everywhere where we're having systems gutted, HR systems taking control, finance systems taking over. And it's just crazy because it's just like this whole widespread breath of control that I saw somebody call it a computer coup, which I think is an interesting way to put it. Yeah, definitely. I've seen others calling it the Elon coup, of course, of the US government.

And on that point, I wanted to ask what you make of this, right? Because people are obviously focusing a lot on Elon Musk and his role at the top of this Doge agency, especially now that Vivek Ramaswamy has been, you know, pushed off into nowhere land, you know, we don't see him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. We'll see if he becomes governor. But so Elon Musk is influencing a lot here, you know, seems to have a lot of authority. You know, he gave that press conference not too long ago in the Oval Office with the president sitting at the desk there. He seems to have a lot of influence over what the Trump administration does. But are we paying too much attention to Elon Musk here? Or does he really have the power that he

looks to have, you know, looking from the outside? Penetrating that Doge bubble has been incredibly difficult reporting wise. So if I want to say with authority, if Elon has this power that we're assuming that he does, I think the best way to demonstrate that would be looking at what he did to Twitter in 2022, because it is the same thing happening to the government right now, play by play. First of all, he's incorporated some folks at GSA and Doge who helped him take over Twitter. Steve Davis, Nicole Hollander, who our reporting has showed, has wanted to put resting furniture in GSA, assuming that people are sleeping in the building, which is wild. But what happened at Twitter was

the same stuff that's happening now in the government. Elon has this thing that he loves called zero-based budgeting, I think it is, which means we cut off all payments. And then you have people who are making these payments, justify them to Elon and his more executive team. And then they decide if they should reinstate these purchases. We're seeing that happen in government. Look at USAID, right? Things are getting slashed. And then people are coming back and being like, hey, this was actually really important. And it's not even just that we're seeing that in these

government agencies, but he's crowdsourcing it on X as well, which is like wild to see. So there's that. And then also the same thing that happened in USDS and TTS that have spoken to sources at both these agencies is we heard so much over the Twitter takeover of Elon asking people to print out one pagers of like their products that they were working on, their projects, and their code, and do these code reviews. This is happening in USDS and TTS. People are being sat into these meetings with young kids who will not identify themselves. They are not giving their names. At least when this was happening at TTSF first, they did not give their names. These kids were signing into these meetings with random Gmail addresses, which threw everyone into a mess because they were like, this is a really terrible security thing if we don't even know who this person is.

And they're accessing it from a non-government system and device, assumedly. And so they're being asked to justify these similar things. And also, an important thing that I don't think I've stressed enough in my reporting that I want to, and I think will happen eventually, TTS has all of its, like I said, these tentacles and other agencies. And so if they are being asked to show their code, they're not only just showing that to someone who is a GSA employee, they're showing this code for whatever system they're working on elsewhere, which isn't typically allowed to see things that are touching other government agencies. It is this wide breadth of access. And I think that's also demonstrated by how these folks like Luke Ferritore, these young kids have multiple government email addresses. You can see them in

the system with GSA email addresses, CDC email addresses, all this stuff. So they have access to all of these different systems, widespread, not even just within one agency. Because we know that the government has a lot of rules around information and sharing information, especially like private and confidential information. Is this potentially like breaching rules within the government around disclosures and sharing and things like that? Yeah. I mean, there's so many questions about if what is going on is illegal. Like one big question right now is can Elon cancel payments that were legally appropriated by Congress? Well, Chuck Schumer says no, of course. And then the White House says Elon is following every

applicable law. The biggest question into seeing if so much of this is illegal is the fact that the system is so opaque right now. Whatever Elon says in the Oval Office about being as transparent as possible with doge.gov, which really just directs to x.com, this actually is not transparent at all. We have no idea. It is very hard to say with certainty how much access they have. I was speaking to someone Thursday evening, last Thursday evening, who has gone through and audited government systems before, payment systems, logistical systems. And they're explaining how it took months for them to get their secret clearance, that if they were to do something at Treasury, they needed a top secret clearance or something like that.

This takes time, whereas these people are just getting like completely thrown into it with no training. If you're like a formal auditor in the government, right, you need to go through trainings every so often. They're always going to be like testing you. You'll get like a surprise test in your email inbox that you'll need to like do to ensure that you're still up to par as an auditor. And this is like, all of these checks and balances are just not happening at all. It's okay though, McKenna, because these guys know how to code, so they understand everything, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is how it works. Well, do they know how to code? Because there is this 404 story about how the freaking Doge website, people can just like deploy edits to it. Like the code base is so insecure that people can

just like shit post on the Doge website. It's insane. It's absolutely insane. Yeah, it really is. And you know, speaking of that opacity, like do we know if Elon Musk is an employee of the government or like what his actual position is? Well, if you looked at him sitting across from Narendra Modi last week, he certainly looked like a head of state with his children shaking Modi's hand with all these like formal White House photos. That was really weird. But the White House says that he's a special government employee, which technically means he's not really being paid. He's like technically SGEs, which they're more commonly referred to. They're like a couple

months in government. So we'll see if maybe in six months he's forced to leave. But at this point, it does feel as if Doge is bulldozing through everything. And even if I think the biggest worry right now amongst like constitutional experts that I've spoken to is that we will finally get like rulings on these court cases and they'll, and Doge will just like ignore them. And what happens when you ignore a federal court and you are also working in the executive office of the president? That is something that has not ever happened in the United States government before. Yeah. It's coming into like really unprecedented situation here. I was reading in one of your colleagues stories as well, that with the way that Doge is set up now, having taken over the US digital service, that that also

gives the Doge agency this ability to like bring in volunteers, bring in people in a way that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do. You know, does that kind of reflect in how Elon Musk is part of this agency? Or is that not really connected there? Yeah, there's a number of ways that people can join USTS. I think there's like four different volunteer type roles that people have been brought in on in the past. And I think really that just gets to the heart of they wanted to find a place where they can just throw people in and take people out and throw them in and give them all this access. And USDS really was

like the best choice available. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, speaking of recruitment and bringing people into the Doge agency, what we know about how they found all these young coders or people who are aligned with them to go into these agencies and do all this work, like where did they come from? Several interns at things like Neuralink, SpaceX, one of them won like an XAI hackathon. I'm assuming that's how he was found. Now, if you don't have any direct ties to Elon and his companies,

it sounds as if there were all of these group chats and like texts being sent out in like December ahead of the inauguration where people were just reaching out to people that they knew being like, hey, do you wanna work for Doge? And here's an application or something. I'll put a good word in for you. And like, that sounds like how it started. So it's folks who are based in Silicon Valley with Silicon Valley contacts, reaching out to their networks and then bringing those people over to DC. That's so wild. Do we know very much about these people and like

what they believe in and what their politics are? Like I assume they were trying to find people who were like politically aligned with this project, not just, you know, anyone who has particular kind of technical talent or whatnot. If you look at several of these young kids, I don't want to misattribute what it is that they all did, but there's been incredibly racist, white nationalist like type posts that we've found that many of them have posted online. One of them leaked inside secrets to like an old company that they worked for. Yeah. So some of them are certainly of this kind of like right leaning, you know, nationalist idea, anti immigration, all that

kind of stuff. Not to say I don't want to say that they all are, but there are some that we know for sure, based off of our reporting and the reporting of others, that they are interested in that stuff, at least. Yeah, that they're aligned with this broader project, right? So it's no surprise that they're the ones who are being brought in to do this kind of stuff and that they want to do it, right? That this is something that they are interested in doing, that they want to align with the Elon Musks and the Peter Thiel's and this larger project of remaking the government for Silicon Valley or around Silicon Valley ideals or however you want to position it. Some of the big stories that we have seen recently have really been around the dismantling of USAID, which does a lot of the distribution of foreign aid and those sorts

of programs around the world on behalf of the United States and the US government, and also the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What role did Doge and these people have in those cases? Yeah, well, what it looks like is that Elon or his crew goes to usaspending.gov, identifies something related to DEI, and then decides to cut it. That really seems to be... I don't have any specific insight into how this is working, but if you just go off of the ex-posts on Elon's Twitter, that seems to be how it's operating, which is like, not even close to what a real government auditor does. Yeah, I've noticed a number of times that he seems to be calling out things that are like, oh my god, we just discovered this crazy spending when it's like public information

that anyone could have seen. I hate to be this person. But anyone who has ever spent any time in DC covering government knows that Politico Pro is what keeps Politico alive. It is a very expensive service that, of course, only government agencies pay for. That is the whole business model of Politico Pro. But you throw somebody into this who does not understand that at all, right? And he sees Politico and he's like, we're paying Politico to spread propaganda. And it's like, okay, whatever. But just so you know, canceling Politico pro in the government is like asking investment firms to cancel all of their Bloomberg terminals, right? That's actually what would kill Bloomberg, you know? And so a lot of it just comes from this complete ignorance to how

DC works. Not saying DC is meant to be this opaque, smoke and mirror system, right? I'm a journalist, for God's sake. I want everything to be more transparent than it already is. But if you're the one who's joining the system trying to make change, right? You should at least be baptized in it a little bit. Yeah, you should at least have to have some understanding of what is actually going on here, especially if you want to make the government better. But it's not clear that that's actually what they want to do. No, because like right now, this is just like a week's long project of like pulling the bandaid off. Like CFPB right now is being completely gutted.

Like that is one of the agencies that like gets money back for everyone. I think it was something like $21 billion or something since its inception that it gets money back for everyone. I think it was something like $21 billion or something since its inception that it's given back to consumers. Like that money isn't saying, okay, we're going to give it all to Democrats. Like that's not how that works at all, right? Like the CFPB thing is actually, Elon has really put a target, like after USAID, it seems like CFPB was the next one that is really getting the ax. Last week, it was mostly, you know, probationary employees that were starting to get fired across government. There's been whispers of reductions in force. We'll hear whether or not that happens. But what I heard last

Thursday evening was that at CFPB specifically, they fired every single technologist hired in the last couple of years to investigate big tech. Every single one. Because, you know, they fired every single technologist hired in the last couple of years to investigate big tech. Every single one. Because they are not necessarily probationary employees, but they're relatively new, so they're easier to cut. And they were brought on all at the same time to work on this project of tech's advance into financial services. And now there's just crazy rumors going on about how much CFPB could get cut. And folks are really, really freaked out. Yeah, it does feel like this is a campaign from Silicon Valley to specifically target

this agency, right? Because we know that CFPB has looked into Tesla in the past, you know, some transactions involving Tesla. Obviously, Elon Musk wants to move X into financial services. You know, we saw Marc Andreessen making a big stink about CFPB. I believe it was late last year, you know, saying that it was debanking all these crypto people and stuff like that. Like it does seem that this agency was in the crosshairs of this industry, right?

Recently, before all the CFPB gutting happened, Elon said, rest in peace CFPB with a like graveyard emoji. But months ago, I think it was like sometime last year, he also tweeted like delete CFPB. So like this is something that has been in his crosshairs for quite a while. Yeah, it's terrible, especially as you say, like it's an agency that is really going to take on the people like Elon Musk, you know, the powerful people, major companies on behalf of like regular ordinary people, including the Trump voters and stuff like that, not just the Democrats. But I think one of the through lines that we have

seen is these powerful people wanting to make sure that agencies or groups or employees that are going to hold them to account through government are, you know, going to get targeted through this campaign. I mean, that seems to be the case. That's been the trend for sure. And was Doge specifically involved in the USAID kind of dismantling as well? Or was that like a broader Trump administration thing? It sounds like it was mostly Doge. I mean, like with all the Doge stuff right now, it seems like Doge is like doing its own thing. And then the White House is trying to catch up to understanding what it is that Doge is doing. Like in all of like the press briefings or something, when someone asks Caroline Levitt, like something about like what Doge has done, she'll be like, oh, I'll check back on that. It's something

that the White House doesn't even feel as if they're fully in the loop on. In that sense, how do we feel the Trump administration's agenda is being driven? Because we have Doge and we have Elon Musk and his kind of people in this agency. We also know that the Heritage Foundation and these right-wing groups had a concerted agenda that they were ready to implement once the Trump administration came to power. Are there just multiple different parts of the Trump administration doing their own things? Is this a broader agenda that they're all working on together? How do you see that? Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of the cuts that are being made at these agencies are some that were

predicted and written in Project 2025. So it feels as if there is like the Trump administration, which is being used to do what it is Project 2025 wanted, and then also do what it is that Doge wanted. Like it seems as if the executive branch is being used as a tool for those two agendas. Of course, I don't have any full insight into conversations like that. Yeah. As you're saying, it's tough to figure out what exactly is going on there, especially if they're making it more and more difficult for FOIA requests, for freedom of information requests to get in there. I even remember the story from, what was it, last week or the week before that apparently Doge was trying to move to a

communication system that would not be able to be accessed by freedom of information requests. Do you know if that happened after or it's hard to say? I think that's technically because they are in the EOP, right? So a lot of what they do is now executive branch and has like presidential record stuff. But one thing like to talk about how secretive so much this has been, I'm in contact with so many people who actually work at USDS and have like worked at USDS for years. And I checked in with one Friday morning and I said, hey, what's going on? And they're like, quiet, business as usual.

And that has been the trend since Doge took over. If like they have been calling it like a firewall that Doge has built between traditional legacy USDS and Doge. Everyone else at USDS is just working on the projects they've been working on before. They're working on the affordable connectivity program and helping people get access to that. They all just are still doing the work that they feel incredibly passionate about, knowing that at some point down the line, something is going to happen. The old deputy administrator of USDS quit recently. And all my reporting around that sounds as if he was just completely left out of meetings about decision making happening

within Elon's crew. And then I heard that he had a for like with the HR person who is this like anti-DEI, DEI, like right wing HR person who was like brought in from Doge. And then she just completely canceled the meeting last minute. And then he was gone the next day, which is like wild. It's so wild for me to say that like Doge has taken over USDS, but it seems as if Doge has taken over office space of USDS and like is working alongside them. And like the doors are just completely locked between them. They aren't even like talking to those folks, which is insane. That is so wild. A couple other things I just wanted to bring up before we move on to something else is there was this email sent out, I believe, a couple of weeks ago now that was effectively offering, you know, making it easy for federal workers to leave their jobs and be paid through. I think it was September.

There's also reporting that, you know, of course, you guys at Wired have been doing about how the General Services Administration seems to be preparing to sell off a ton of federal buildings. Do we know how many people actually left their jobs after and what this, you know, kind of real estate divestment by the federal government is going to potentially look like? Yeah, I think the number from the administration was something like 70,000 people took the fork. It's being called colloquially the fork right now. And that's how people are referring to it inside government. Some people took it 70,000, which is like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of like the US federal workforce. I've been trying

to like figure out what the actual numbers is on like typical churn year by year. And curious if it's that's just similar, like the 70,000 is just similar to like the normal year over year churn of federal government workers. But I haven't done that yet. So I don't know for sure. But yeah, so it's very clear that they want to get rid of headcount. That has been a point Elon has made, Doja's made, Trump has made, etc. for months at this point. Now, another part of this that is getting clearer is the use of AI seemingly as a replacement for many of these workers, right? At GSA specifically, I was speaking earlier about this giant meeting that they had where they want to turn GSA into this AI first agency. They want to use Thomas Shedd, this Tesla engineer, like I mentioned, he mentioned to fully automate tasks

across TTS to centralize all government data in one place, which sounds great to many technologies and government. That sounds great. But there are a lot of privacy laws that get in the way of that. Who needs those? Forget about those. Come on. Well, and that's the thing. So like, that was the thing in one of the meetings that get in the way of that. Who needs those? Forget about those. Come on. Well, and that's the thing. So like, that was the thing in one of the meetings that I was listening to was some TTS worker was like, okay, I think, you know, this all sounds great. But like, I think like the Privacy Act keeps us from doing this. And he was like calling things like that roadblocks, like quote roadblocks, which is like kind of wild to think of laws keeping you from doing these things. Anyways, to get closer,

he's also trying to speed run this project that was started by the Biden administration, which is like kind of just a chatbot at GSA that maybe could be a coding agent, maybe can just help with everyday tasks. Now it seems as if that project is getting larger, and they're wanting to like just make it, put it out as soon as possible. It sounds as if they're wanting to get ahead of like bad stories and like try and put out this cool stuff and they're wanting to like just make it put it out as soon as possible it sounds if they're wanting to get ahead of like bad stories and like try and put out this cool stuff that they're doing right ahead of all the leaks because jesus is leaking like a sieve right now but yeah so there is this tandem firing and adoption of ai happening which really makes it sound as if they're replacing government workers with AI. Does it feel like that is being used as like justification? Like, I feel like,

you know, one of the big warnings that a lot of critics have had about this recent phase of AI rollout, generative AI, all this kind of stuff, looking back at, say, the 2010s, and what happened in that period was like, there was a lot of talk about AI replacing jobs, and it didn't actually happen. But these companies rolled out in ai in such a way to like justify getting rid of workers or to like reduce the power of workers and it feels like when we're looking at what doge is doing and what the trump administration is doing in government is to say as well like we want to gut the workforce of government but don't worry we're going to bring in ai and it's going to make everything so much more efficient and blah, blah, blah. Like it does feel like, you know, one of these big warning signs, these big like kind of red lights is like, oh, yeah, OK, it's right there.

It's happening in front of our eyes. Yeah. But I also think like when I talk to federal workers who have been doing tech work for a long time, what they tell me is that so much of the tech problems in government are actually people problems. They are management problems. They are communication problems, right? And so not always are these people identifying like, okay, we need to build this new product and it's going to solve everything. Like that's actually not oftentimes the most efficient way to go about things. Sometimes it's just like having a conversation and being like, hey, we should like have this office connect with this office more often. And that'll make things better. Well, now you can just have that conversation with the GSAI chatbot, right? So wild to think

about, you know, how this is all happening and how this is all being rolled out. I wonder, though, that focus on AI, how that aligns with the broader Trump administration's focus on AI and how it's part of its like tech agenda. The real kind of focus has seemed to be this America will be like the top AI country or whatever. We're going to make all the chips and we're going to like have all the best systems and we're going to outpace China and all of this. I have a feeling, yes, of course, it plays into this thing. And you have like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and everyone's showing up at the inauguration. It's very clear that this is a priority. You know, we'll see what happens there, right? We're still in this moment where

like there's so much focus on AI and there's so much excitement about it. It feels like that was like waning through last year. And then like, there's been like this revival with the Trump administration and like this new energy going into, you know, this technology and what was happening with it. Yeah. And like change is also being discussed about like, I mean, the important thing also is that this isn't just like a tech issue. This is also like an energy issue. This is also an environment issue. Like when it comes to building more chip centers or mining more crypto or something, you don't just need tech policies around that. You need easy energy climate policies in order to use greater energy and resources to produce this stuff. And that

is something that, of course, the Trump administration is far more eager to do than the Biden administration was. Yeah, absolutely. I even see like up here in Canada, when the government talks about AI, it's like, okay, we need to make sure AI works for everybody. But also, we have a bunch of nuclear power and hydropower that could be used to power data centers. And it's like, guys, is this really the focus right now? We just want the big data centers here. And then also, okay, here's one thing I was hearing. And I I don't know if this is like, DOE is also getting like- Department of Energy. Yeah, Department of Energy.

There's so many DOEs because there's Department of Education. I've been saying DOE to my coworkers and they'll be like, are you talking about Linda McMahon? And I'm like, no, not this time. I'm not talking about Linda McMahon this time. But that means that there's going to be like energy hubs run by the DOE, which are now seeing like hundreds and hundreds of people laid off? Like, how is that going to work? Like, those are very hands on jobs that some people I'm sure would love to take, like, honestly, thinking about that versus like a pencil pusher role, which are still incredibly important in government oftentimes. But like somebody who's like in the

field, like helping with our energy infrastructure being like, you know, I honestly could take a six month vacation and get paid with full benefits. I wouldn't blame them for taking it, honestly. And I have a feeling like those forks are going to be picked up a lot more in those roles, unfortunately, than maybe some that were picked up in D.C. You know, before we move on to something else that I want to ask you about, is there anything else about this kind of doge takeover of government that you feel is important for the listeners to understand that I didn't think to ask you about? I think right now, the people who are feeling this the most are the federal workers who are getting laid off. But in the conversations I've had about these

systems being easily broken and not easily repaired, this stuff could affect anyone. Some system could fail affecting you or your grandmother or your mother, your father, something like that at any point with all these people messing, you know, or allegedly like just even like looking at these systems and playing around with things. And yeah, I feel like right now people in, unless you're like blue wave, like liberal coded, you're not really paying attention too much to not thinking that it's happening to you yet, or like it's affecting you. And I do think at the pace that we're moving right now, I think it's going to touch a lot of folks. And of course, starting with the most vulnerable. Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, if Twitter goes down a bit more often,

because Elon Musk has laid off a bunch of workers and shut down a data center or something, we'll survive, right? You know, it's okay. But if these treasury systems go down, if these other systems that ensure the delivery of key benefits and services that people rely on go down, that can be, you know, a much bigger disruption in people's lives and can also take some time to get back online, as you were saying. Yeah, that's something that would happen suddenly too, right? That is not like the slow decline of systems. And so I think that's like the most important thing I've been trying to stress, even just in conversations with like family and friends

recently. I think it's a key point. And so to close off our conversation, I also wanted to ask you about the work of reporting on these things. You know, you and your colleagues have received, I think, a lot of deserved compliments for the work that you have been doing over the past few weeks to chronicle what the tech industry has been doing within the Trump administration and the wider impacts here. What has it been like to be covering this story and how has Wired been approaching it? This did not come out of nowhere. I want to stress that. I was hired at the end of 2023 with a handful of other colleagues to build out this new politics desk at Wired because our fearless leader, Katie Drummond, got brought on as the global editorial director and said, Wired needs

to be covering politics. It was met with a lot of backlash at first. I feel like I was not the most popular person to Wired's audience for quite a while after being brought on in this role. But this Silicon Valley takeover of the government has been a project for at least the last 10 to 20 years. We are hitting this point where it's on Capitol Hill, it's at the White House. And I think Katie was incredibly smart in seeing where all this was going to go over the next couple of years and set up a team. Myself, I started reporting as a Capitol Hill reporter for a publication called CQ Roll Call. Like that is another one of those Politico Pro type sites that does a lot of writing for the government and writing for lawmakers, which means you got to learn all of the most granular parts

of like congressional reporting. Like I remember once I was asked to like, some lawmaker had written an amendment on a sticky note and then like threw it away. And I needed to like pick that up and write about it and scan it to the website. Right. So like there's this mix of people who've been covering tech for a very long time and been covering government at like the most granular level that we have brought together. Folks who are very smart on covering like global tech, folks who have been doing disinformation reporting for a very long time. I like, I love everyone on our team works so well together. It's just a really well put together team with a lot of great expertise and a lot of smarts. And we all work together

really well. And we had that year of covering the election together and saw where all this was going as soon as the first assassination attempt happened and Elon Musk came out in support of Trump. We're like, okay, things are changing for sure right now. This was definitely a turning point. As discussions of Doge happened, it was time to get like sourced up in government to look at that specifically. And I think it was not just like we got a tip and it led to more tips. This was like a process that we started together knowing what was going to happen. And it set us up really, really well for this terrible moment, right. But it's wired up really, really well. And I'm just like incredibly proud and like proud to be a part of the team and proud of all my colleagues.

Yeah, no, I think you should be. And I think what you say there about having that expertise in government is so key as well. Right. Because I feel like in the past, in certain publications, you know, we've had people who, you know, were experts on technology and interested in technology as the tech industry moved into these other fields, you know, because tech is everywhere now that you don't always have people who have the insight and kind of the historical knowledge on all these different industries that tech is getting involved in. So to have people who

know tech really well and who know government really well to be able to bring those insights together, you know, it really shows in the reporting that you guys have been doing recently. Wired has been like one of my key sources for what has been going on the past little while. So yeah, it really shows. Yeah, we appreciate that. Everyone's kind of like riding the lightning right now. And we're all very committed to the work. Everyone has not been sleeping and people are sick and now being forced to take breaks. But yeah, it's definitely been just like a crazy moment. Yeah. Meanwhile, Elon and the Doge boys just keep going at it and keep destroying things. Yeah. We haven't gotten to the point of sleeping in the office yet. Like Elon allegedly does. They're not setting up resting rooms for you.

No, I don't think I want to, I don't want to sleep in a tube. Honestly, not my favorite thing. I feel that. It has been really great to speak to you about all of this. I'm sure that there's going to be so much more happening. And maybe you or some of your other Wired colleagues will be back on the show to fill us in on future developments. But I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. Keep up the great work. Thanks so much. Yeah, of course. It was great being here. McKenna Kelly is a senior writer at Wired, where she also writes the Politics Lab newsletter. Tech Won't Save Us Thank you. slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.