The Journal. - Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

In the first few minutes of the Trump presidency, Elon Musk’s programmers made a surprise incursion into a key personnel agency. Since then, DOGE programmers operating in the shadows have burrowed into systems across the government, resulting in thousands of layoffs. WSJ’s Scott Patterson explains how DOGE has entered vast parts of the federal bureaucracy.  Further Reading: -Inside DOGE’s Clash With the Federal Workforce  -DOGE Claims It Has Saved Billions. See Where.  Further Listening: -Trump 2.0: The Musk-Trump Bromance  -Inside USAID as Elon Musk and DOGE Ripped It Apart  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At President Trump's first cabinet meeting on Wednesday, there was a familiar face, standing up front, wearing a black MAGA hat and a t-shirt that read Tech Support. I actually just call myself a humble tech support here because this is actually, as crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing. Elon Musk was there to tell the cabinet about the work that Doge, or the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has been doing.

He said they're helping to fix out-of-date computer systems as part of his goal to reduce the national deficit. If we don't do this America will go bankrupt. That's why it has to be done. Whether or not that prediction is true, Doge is moving fast to cut spending and slash the federal government. Shutting down USAID. The CFPB. About 5% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are being let go. Already more than 200 have been fired from FEMA,

around 400 from the Federal Aviation Administration, and more than a thousand from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Given all that Doge has done in just a few weeks, the Wall Street Journal wanted to get inside exactly how this new pseudo-agency has been operating. And our colleagues found a scorched-earth approach that is incredibly secretive, quickly takes control of government data, and that tests the limits of what's legal. Welcome to The Journal,

our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leimbach. It's Friday, February 28th. Coming up on the show, behind the scenes of Doge's campaign to gut the federal government. I got this condition where I don't feel pain. You're a superhero. If this is how intense Nova Kane sounds... Oh, wow! ...imagine how it looks. Is there more?

Yeah, big time. Nova Kane, only in theaters March 14th. My reporting shows that at 12.01 p.m. on January 20th, the day that Trump was inaugurated, there were some people from Doge arriving at this obscure agency called the Office of Personnel Management. Our colleague Scott Patterson has been trying to understand how Doge is operating. To do this, Scott and his team spoke to over two dozen current and former government employees, as well as senior officials with the Trump administration.

And what they found was that on inauguration day, as Trump was being sworn in, Musk's team was already inside the Office of Personnel Management. They were at OPM demanding access to computer systems. They meet some resistance by people who don't know or believe that they have this authorization, but they very quickly get it.

And within about a half an hour, they are in the OPM systems and pretty quickly able to access a large amount of information that's in those systems. And who is them? Like who are the people who are carrying out this work? They're generally young men. It's a bunch of young computer programmers,

many of whom had worked at must companies, like internships at SpaceX or Tesla or Neuralink. Why was OPM the first agency that the dozers wanted access to? You know, if your goal was to reduce the size of the federal workforce, there'd be no better place because that is the human resources arm of the federal workforce. And once they were in there, what did they do? Their first project was putting together this mass email system. And, you know, I was told that some of these people, even before the inauguration, had met with people at OPM and asked about this.

They asked, do you have a system where you can email the entire federal workforce? The ultimate modern power, a mass email. Yeah. Yeah, 2.3 million people. A few days later, Doge put that very powerful tool to work. It sent out a test email, intended to hit every single employee in the federal government. Days later, another email went out, this time with a choice. Quit your job and get eight months of paid leave, or keep your job but risk being fired.

That's why they went to OPM, was to use it as a cudgel against the federal workforce to try to reduce the size of it to get people to quit, and to ultimately fire people as well. How did they do it? The way they operate is they insulate themselves from the career staff. And so at OPM, they set up shop

on the fifth floor of the building where the senior leadership works and have kind of closed themselves off from the rest of the career staff, many of whom they move to another floor. I was told that there's guards in that room and they have printouts of the faces of people who are approved to be able to interact with them. They typically remove access to the computer systems from a lot of the career staff, so they can't even get in

and do their work anymore. At one point, according to Scott's reporting, a Doge programmer took control of OPM's website, taking down its diversity, equity, and inclusion pages. And sources told Scott that in video chats with OPM staff, the Dogers sometimes keep their cameras turned off. We reached out to the White House about this, and an administration official said

Doge operates in secrecy partially because they know federal employees are opposed to their efforts and would want to thwart them. There are also safety concerns concerns because the White House says that Doge employees are receiving threats. Doge has been using similar tactics at other agencies. You know, they do have a playbook. I've talked to people in multiple agencies

and they come in sort of guns blazing, very aggressive, they demand access to these computer systems. You know, at first they get so-called read-only access where they're going to look at things, but then they just push it and push it and push it until they have full what's called administrative access. So far, Dozers have burrowed into systems all across the government, including the Treasury Department,

the IRS, and the agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid. They've also effectively shut down some agencies like USAID, and they now have access to highly sensitive data. That kind of took people back because it's got all of this information about the US federal workforce inside those computers. Sensitive information, information about their healthcare, their social security numbers, their families,

all sorts of things and that's very tightly guarded information. A White House spokesman said Doge, quote, has fully integrated into the federal government to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. He also said they will continue to do so and that many inside the government needed to get with the program. And last weekend, Dozier's once again picked up their favorite tool

and sent out another mass email with the subject line, "'What did you do last week?' The email asked all federal workers to reply with a list of five accomplishments from their week. In a tweet, Musk said that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

For some in the government, this was one step too far. We did start to see some pushback within the Trump cabinet. So there were some leaders of departments, including the FBI, who told employees not to respond to that. And it's kind of easy to see why, because you don't want FBI agents or CIA agents or other people and secrecy agencies saying what they did last week. So that has caused some of the biggest pushback that we've seen so far. How Musk responded to that pushback is coming up after this break. On Wednesday, Trump convened his first cabinet meeting.

Reporters were there, Elon Musk was there, and that five-point email came up. I think that email perhaps was best interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? So if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email. The question came after reports that some cabinet officials had complained to the White House about the suddenness of Doge's moves,

including unannounced incursions onto their turf and some of Musk's tweets. You know, Suzy Wiles, the Chief of Staff of the White House, has pretty recently asked Elon to provide updates on what their plans are several times a week. And this is because they've been caught by surprise by some of the things that Doge is doing, either at the agencies or, you know, with the emails. And I think they want to have a little bit more preparation, you know, to be able to respond to these things and maybe, you know, talk them down a little bit from some of the more extreme plans that they may have. And I think that, you know, it's also just,

Elon is seen as a wild card. They don't know what he's gonna do next, it could be anything. Another reporter questioned how the cabinet was feeling about Doge's actions. You had heard anything about members of the cabinet who weren't happy with the way things were going and if so what are you doing to address

those any dissatisfaction? And Trump immediately jumped in. Let the cabinet speak just for a second. Is anybody unhappy with the... If you are, we'll throw them out of here. Trump backed Musk's actions. And the White House press secretary said that everyone is working together as one unified team.

Quote, any notion to the contrary is false. Trump's support means Doge will keep moving forward with slashing government spending. So far, Doge claims it's already saved the government billions. Government efficiency says it has saved tens of billions of dollars. 50 billion, 55 billion dollars, 65 billion dollars in savings. Doge now says it's saving the government 65 billion dollars. But a Wall Street Journal analysis found Doge's claims are overstated. The Wall Street Journal analysis found Doge's claims are overstated. The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations have shown that a lot of the claims of things

and savings that they've accomplished are illusions, often contracts that didn't even exist or multiple contracts or claiming billions of dollars in savings when actually it was a couple million in one case. So that part, which is kind of what they claim to be their number one goal, has so far been pretty much a flop. Doge says it's canceled $7 billion in contracts, but the journal analysis projects that number is closer to 2.6 billion. In part, that's because a lot of those contracts have already been paid, so canceling them doesn't save any money. When we first started hearing

about this effort, this Doge effort, Musk was saying he wanted to save $2 trillion. How close do you think Doge will get to that? Two trillion is not going to happen. You would have to eliminate a large part of the US military or major welfare programs, Medicaid, Medicare. Anyway, that was never realistic. To achieve savings like that, you would have to have an act of Congress,

and Congress is doing that. They're putting a budget together. They say they will make major cuts to big programs, including Medicaid. But they're actually still, because they have massive tax cuts, they don't have enough cuts to equal out the amount that they're going to lose from the tax cuts. And Musk initially said $2 trillion. He dialed that back to $1 trillion.

That's still totally unrealistic. What's next for Doge? I don't think there's any way we can know. I think they've surprised us from the jump. Nobody that I know of had any idea that Musk was going to do this on such a scale. And when you own a company, if it fails, he loses his money, he goes home, you know, it's his money. He goes home. You know, it's his problem. This is a different animal he's dealing with

right now the entire American federal government so without a doubt it will be interesting to see what happens next and I will be a front seat Eating popcorn and we'll have you back to tell us about it. Happy to come back Yesterday a federal judge ordered OPM to reverse the mass firings of probationary workers across agencies, saying that the terminations were probably illegal. That's all for today, Friday, February 28th. Additional reporting in this episode by James Benedict, Josh Dawsey, Kaitlyn Ostroff, Brian Schwartz, and Shane Shifflett. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Pia Gadkari,

Rachel Humphreys, Sophie Coddner, Ryan Knudsen, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singie, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zimis, and me, Kate Linebaugh, with help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley.

Additional music this week from Bobby Lord, Emma Munker, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher and Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.