The Pentagon’s elite tech unit is collapsing after clashing with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Nearly every staffer at the Defense Digital Service (DDS) is resigning over the coming month, according to the program’s director Jennifer Hay and three other current members of the office—effectively shutting down the program.
“The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said, according to Politico. She plans to leave by May 1.
Dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” the DDS was created in 2015 with the aim to modernize defense operations with fast tech fixes and digital tools for the military.
Hay’s 14 person team was reportedly blindsided at being sidelined by DOGE, having expected the DDS, with its tech talent, to be brought into Musk’s drive to automate operations at the Pentagon and integrate AI.
“The reason we stuck it out as long as we have is that we thought we were going to be called in,” Hay told Politico.
Instead, DOGE appears to have followed a familiar playbook, cutting employees and pressuring them to quit. Hay and 11 DDS staffers are taking President Donald Trump’s deferred resignation package.
Every employee interviewed by Politico said they would have stayed if not for DOGE.
An unidentified departing team member said that with the resignations, critical initiatives—like improving the Pentagon’s tech talent pipeline and countering enemy drones—will be abandoned.
A former senior Pentagon official dismissed DOGE’s supposed mission to eliminate “waste and fraud,” arguing Musk’s brainchild is essentially a wrecking ball.
“They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said.
DOGE’s cost-cutting crusade has already shuttered other digital modernization programs, including the General Services Administration’s 18F program. Staff there—who built open-source digital tools for government use—had less time to resign, losing access to their email accounts immediately after receiving an overnight shutdown notice on March 1.
A Pentagon spokesperson told Politico the office’s functions would be absorbed by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAIO), the broader department it falls under.
When reached for comment, a press officer at the Department of Defense told the Daily Beast, “We don’t have anything to provide on this currently.”
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