On Tuesday, 21 data scientists, product managers and the head of IT at the United States Digital Service (USDS) — an agency created in 2014 as a central digital collection point for federal agencies and renamed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under — resigned on Tuesday, saying they refused to use their technical skills to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations, however, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” read a resignation statement posted online.
Those leaving their posts warned that many of the mainly young men that Musk has hired as part of his army to destroy American bureaucracy are political ideologues without the skills to master the task at hand.
US President appointed Musk — the world’s richest man, who has tens of billions in US government contracts and happens to be Trump’s biggest individual donor — to head the agency to cut as much money as possible out of the federal government.
Are the effects of DOGE firings being felt?
and cuts to domestic and foreign spending. This has now begun to send shockwaves through society, causing great concern regarding the fate of the functioning of government and the unbridled nature with which Musk and his crew have gleefully announced the firings of “evil deep-state bureaucrats.”
Day by day, individual communities are seeing what such cuts mean to them. USAID, for instance — the first agency to be “fed into the woodchipper” by DOGE — seems remote to people until they realize that most of the money the agency allocates goes to American farmers.
People have also become more aware of the bullying that federal employees are facing, not only from DOGE employees but from Musk himself, who regularly takes to his personal social media platform X to make all sorts of statements about the US government, its workings and employees — all without consequence.
Is Elon Musk bullying federal employees?
Last week, at work over the past week and submit it by Monday. Failure to reply, he wrote, would be seen as a resignation.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday said more than 1 million federal employees had responded to the request, less than half of the federal workforce.
The mail and others like it have created great confusion, with the Office of Personnel Management, and even staunchly pro-Trump administrators like incoming FBI Director Kash Patel, advising workers to ignore the demand.
Musk, however, seems to want to force the showdown, writing on X late Monday evening, “Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Trump did not help things when he claimed workers would be “sort of semi-fired,” if they failed to reply to Musk’s original request.
DOGE’s firings keep going
Meanwhile across the government. On Tuesday, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that 1,400 “non-mission critical” employees had been fired. That comes on top of 1,000 VA firings announced on February 13.
On Monday, the fired director of the VA cybersecurity team, Jonathan Kamens, voiced fear, saying, “eventually I think there will be a security incident resulting from the lack of adequate security oversight” when it comes to Musk’s team and its access to sensitive government and personal data.
Other agencies have lost mass numbers of employees. The IRS, for example, is heading into tax season with 7,000 fewer employees than it had just a few weeks ago.
In all, more than 20,000 jobs have been slashed since DOGE began its work. The US federal government employs a total of ca. 2.3 million people.
But are DOGE firings doing any good?
Numerous employees have had to be hired back to their positions after it was learned what they or their departments actually do.
Critics have argued vociferously that the government agencies that DOGE is going after were designed in some cases to do what DOGE is doing and did it far more efficiently than Musk and his unorthodox team of young disruptors — who apparently lack any knowledge of how the US government operates.
Moreover, critics continue, despite Trump’s claims — without evidence — that Musk and DOGE have turned up “hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud,” the unsystematic way that DOGE is approaching its task will not save that much money in the end.
Lastly, as employees and , DOGE and the federal government.
Still, Press Secretary Leavitt voiced faith in her boss and his approach, saying: “Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years.”
Edited by: Louis Oelofse
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