wired | As one of his first acts after being sworn in, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by reorganizing and renaming an existing entity, the US Digital Services (USDS), as the US DOGE Service. And while some have noted that this version of DOGE moves away from the sweeping vision of deregulation outlined in a November Wall Street Journal op-ed, it's a move that will give centibillionaire Elon Musk and his allies seemingly unprecedented insight across the government, and access to troves of federal data.
“It’s
quite a clever way of integrating DOGE into the federal government that
I think will work, in the sense of giving it a platform for
surveillance and recommendations,” says Richard Pierce, a law professor
at George Washington University.
Soon after his election victory, Trump announced that he would form DOGE, led by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to provide
"advice and guidance from outside the government"—something that
would generally require it be formed as a federal advisory committee.
The idea was that DOGE would provide recommendations for how to cut some
$2 trillion from the federal budget. (Shortly before Trump’s
inauguration, Ramaswamy exited the DOGE project.)
Musk put out a call for people to work with DOGE online, and turned the Washington, DC office of his company SpaceX into a staging ground for the entity
while bringing in other major figures from Silicon Valley to assist in
the effort. Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen apparently joined the
effort as a self-proclaimed “unpaid intern.”
But
under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, committees of the sort DOGE
seemed to be shaping up to have several legal requirements, including
making all meetings publicly accessible and requiring a diversity of
perspectives on the committee itself. By repurposing the USDS, which was
already part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Trump
managed to skirt both the requirements of a formal advisory committee
and the Congressional oversight required when creating a new federal
agency. In short, it meant DOGE would get more access to sensitive data
than an advisory committee would likely have, while offering less
transparency.
The USDS was created by former president Barack Obama to untangle dysfunctional or failing technology across the federal government
in the wake of the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov. The Service’s
mandate allows it the wide-ranging ability to enter any government
agency and access its software or technical systems with the goal of
helping to streamline or reform existing systems.
Under
the executive order, DOGE teams, which “will typically include one DOGE
Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one
attorney” will be dispatched to various agencies. They will be granted
“access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT
systems,” ostensibly with the goal of streamlining data sharing across
federal agencies.
A
former USDS employee who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity
called the repurposing of the Digital Service an “A+ bureaucratic
jiu-jitsu move.” But, they say, they’re concerned that DOGE’s access to
sensitive information could be used to do more than just streamline
government operations.
“Is
this technical talent going to be pointed toward using data from the
federal government to track down opponents?” they ask. “To track down
particular populations of interest to this administration for the
purposes of either targeting them or singling them out or whatever it
might end up being?”
