The DOGE Resistance
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On Tuesday, 21 federal workers from the U.S. Digital Service resigned in protest. The USDS, which was created in the Obama administration, got rolled into the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, earlier this year. There's been a bunch of legacy employees at that unit that are unhappy with what's going on. Ryan Mack is a tech reporter for The New York Times.

They don't agree with the orders that are being given from folks like Elon Musk and his associates. And they resigned very publicly. They signed a letter. That number, 21, represents about a third of the remaining employees in the unit. About 40 had been previously laid off or fired in rounds of cuts. And these folks kind of just said, you know, we've had enough. We're not going to stand for this and we're going to resign.

The 21 workers wrote a letter to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and they also made a website, wethebuilders.org. On it, they referenced Doge, writing, If they really wanted to know how to use technology to build a more efficient country, they would ask us. But they haven't. They are destroyers. We are builders. It's actually funny you mentioned that it was addressed to Susie Wiles. And a large part of that was because...

They were in the dark as to who this Doge administrator was. Obviously, we all know that Elon Musk is talked about publicly. Donald Trump sings his praises as the head of this effort. But on paper, he is not the Doge administrator. So they addressed it to Susie Wiles. But it just shows the lack of transparency here. These folks didn't know who they were reporting to.

They didn't know what their responsibilities were in some cases. And there was very little kind of explanation as to what they'd be doing. And so they quit. Loudly. They were just a small group of workers. But they're not the only ones. Today on the show, through protests, resignations and lawsuits, federal workers are throwing sand in the gears of Elon Musk's metaphorical chainsaw. Will it matter?

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Over the past few weeks, staffers from Doge have fanned out across federal agencies. And despite pledges of transparency, there isn't much. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is meant to serve as a watchdog for the financial sector, CFPB workers took their phones out to film the Doge staffers. They started trying to identify these folks. Who are they? They're not saying their names. They're not giving their titles. They're not saying why they're here.

And they wanted just to know what was going on because they were completely in the dark. The union representing the CFPB workers has filed lawsuits saying Doge's actions violate both worker privacy and the separation of powers. You know, they're trying to prevent Elon and his team from doing this kind of blitzkrieg and giving the time to courts to, I guess, examine the question further.

Are they doing legal things? Are they working within the bounds of the law? As we've reported on this show, Doge has also been working within the Technology Transformation Services, a high-tech unit that has broad reach across government.

This is kind of another high-functioning tech-focused unit, kind of similar to USDS in terms of the people they recruit. And there we've seen a lot of resistance on Slack. Folks that have resigned publicly and said, I'm not going to give access to this administrator who wants full access to these databases that have all this personal information.

We've seen humorous kind of forms of resistance as well. You know, we've talked about this fork in the road email that has gone out to employees asking them, you know, if do you want to be a hardcore committed employee to the federal government? And it's referred as the fork in the road, which is a carryover from Elon's Twitter takeover. But in response to that, a lot of employees have responded with spood emojis on Slack and

And, you know, they put it in their usernames, displaying their distaste for pronged instruments, I guess. Let's talk about the email. Over the weekend, on Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk tweets that federal employees have to email this HR address at the Office of Personnel Management about what they had done all week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation, he writes.

This I know is familiar to you since you extensively covered the Twitter takeover. He did something similar. Please reply to this email with approximately five bullets of what you accomplished last week. CC your manager. Don't send any classified information, yada, yada. I find the way that different agencies and employees have reacted to this to be really fascinating because you've got like

The FBI, state and homeland security, these are Trump loyal agencies, saying, no, you don't need to reply to him. Others said, yes, you do. What does all this tell you? And like, what kind of responses, if any, were you seeing from federal employees? Just that it's so disorganized. I mean, it says a lot that Kash Patel, Trump's FBI director, told FBI employees, you don't need to do this.

Elon is really someone who shoots first and asks later. You know, there's no like consideration really or foresight. And that's what we saw play out this weekend with this tweet that he was just going to ask federal employees to send this email in and tell him their five accomplishments for the week, which is crazy.

exactly what he did at Twitter with employees there. I feel like a broken record saying this over and over again, but so much of this can be taken from the Twitter takeover playbook. Ryan and fellow Times reporter Kate Conger wrote a great book, Character Limit, about Musk's Twitter takeover. I honestly can't tell you where we stand on that email either. I guess it depends on what agency you sit in.

I think there is some language from OPM, the agency that sent out that email and who was responsible for collecting those responses, that it's not mandatory. But Trump, for the last few days, has been saying, you know, maybe it is mandatory and you're going to maybe be punished if you don't respond. And there's a lot of just weird messaging around it. And the lack of clarity is confusing for me. I can't imagine what it's like for a federal employee.

On Wednesday, at President Trump's first cabinet meeting, Elon Musk, who is not in the cabinet, held court. Musk claimed that Doge would double down on the initial email that was sent over the weekend.

You know, employees are making a lot of really big decisions right now. The ones who have decided to stay...

What do they tell you about why they're sticking around? Are they on board with the mission? Do they just have, you know, rent and families? What's their thought process? You know, I think it's really tricky to assess or generalize, you know, why people stay. I don't know if it's necessarily an endorsement of everything that's going on. We saw this at Twitter as well, that the folks that stayed stayed

had reasons for doing so other than believing in Elon Musk's mission. You know, they needed the healthcare, they needed to cover their mortgage. Some were on visas and needed their employment status to remain in the country. You know, I don't think you can begrudge anyone for staying necessarily, or, you know, not being part of the resistance. If you, if you feel that way, everyone's got their own reason. And, um,

I think that's the difficult thing. It's not just like a clear black and white, like you're for Elon and Trump or you're against them kind of thing. You know, this is people's livelihoods. And then on the other hand, you know, you get a lot of people that do endorse that message, who believe in this efficiency effort.

or believe that Elon Musk and Donald Trump have good points. Right now, there are more than 20 lawsuits challenging either him, Doge, the structure, access to information.

In one of the court hearings, in one of the lawsuits on Monday, the presiding judge just had this very clear question, which is, where is Mr. Musk in all of this? And like, yeah, fair question. What is his role? Because the administration has been tap dancing all over the place to say, no, no, he's not the administrator. So like, what's his job here?

It's so strange because I could say it's very clear, but it's also not clear. You know, there's like two different answers. And what we do know is it's very clear that Donald Trump has tasked him with overseeing this effort. It's undeniable. He praises him every day for it. And so if you just look at the public statements, he's effectively saying,

you know, the president's most influential advisor. You know, we've heard talk about him being like the shadow president in a way. And so from that perspective, like, you know, we all have eyes. We can see it. We can see them in interviews with Sean Hannity or on Wednesday watching them hold a cabinet meeting. Musk, in his black MAGA baseball cap, was speaking almost as if he was the president. He does refer to Doge as his entity.

Except that's not true.

Multiple news outlets have talked to current and former USAID staffers who say Ebola prevention funding has largely been cut off since last month. This leads to one of the main challenges for employees trying to gum up the DogeWorks. Who is in charge? You and I have eyes. We can plainly see that Elon Musk is driving this operation. And again, he refers to Doge as we. But the White House says he is a presidential advisor.

In answer to many questions from journalists and in court, the administration named someone else, a woman named Amy Gleason as the Doge administrator. Who is Amy Gleason, who was this week revealed to, I guess, be the administrator of Doge? Potentially, you know, in name only. I don't know if she was aware of that appointment coming, but she is a...

former USCS staffer and healthcare executive. She worked at USCS in the first Trump administration into part of the Biden administration, if I believe correctly, and has since reemerged at USCS in this unit. She was in a reporting hired on December 30th again. Odd time, right? Because that's

really the tail end of the Biden administration. It's before the inauguration, but we had documents showing she was brought in for the last couple of weeks of the Biden administration and has now elevated herself to be this administrator. You know, she has ties to another Trump advisor, this guy, Brad Smith, another healthcare entrepreneur executive who has been around. And

You know, I don't know if she was even prepared to be named in this way. Our reporting shows that she was scheduled to be on vacation in Mexico as this announcement came out. And a lot of our thinking is that this announcement was kind of forced, you

When we come back, Ryan talks about the one thing that could slow down Elon Musk.

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The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.

a new podcast from Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So far, it seems that we have seen Doge continue apace. Have you seen any evidence that any of these resignations, lawsuits, protests have interrupted their work?

Yes and no. I would say the lawsuits, like the CFPB union lawsuit, you know, that has slowed down the effort to kill the agency effectively. You know, there are now rulings that are going to happen in early March or responses that are going to happen in early March, you know, and each day is just an added day where they can't move and continue to cut or slash jobs or disable that agency. So there is...

slowing of that effort in a way. And I think that is the best that those employees can do right now is to slow the effort and let the courts, you know, work and let Congress ask questions about what's going on. The public resignations, I think, are not great in terms of an image for the Trump administration, right? They were very mad yesterday about the 21-year

USDS employees resigning to the point where Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, and I think a Doge spokesperson had a tweet that said, you know, these employees were going to get fired anyway. They were hanging trans flags in their places of work, even though they work from home. You know, it was a very bizarre tweet, and it clearly showed that this stuff gets under their skin. Elon responded on X as well, I think saying, like, these guys were going to get fired anyways, but like,

That form of resistance, I think, empowers the other side, you know, and gives them energy.

In a way that, you know, we might see a domino effect with other folks who are thinking about resigning doing the same thing. I'm curious also watching sort of what has happened in a few town halls during the congressional recess. You had some GOP senators, members of Congress getting pushback from their constituents saying, well, wait a minute, I'm concerned about my benefits or, you know, my hometown benefits.

And I'm trying to parse out how much that pushback matters in Elon's mind and how much it matters overall if the Trump administration, specifically the president, is still standing behind Elon. To be honest, I don't think it matters to him at all. He's not paying attention to those meetings. You know, he might get a clip or two on X that come across his feed, but...

I feel like that kind of bottom-up pressure will play out in that those lawmakers might feel the pressure, and then they might fall out of line when it comes to voting or enacting the next, you know, whatever initiative that he wants in government. You know, they may ask questions. You know, there was a little bit of that on Tuesday night with regards to the vote on the budget and, you know,

Folks expressing or some of those lawmakers expressing doubts ultimately got over the line. But, you know, we're just in the first couple of weeks of the administration. Right. And so what happens if this tension continues to play out for the coming weeks, months, year until the midterm? If people's jobs are on the line with that type of pressure, you might see a little more dissent. I want to pick up on something you said that Elon doesn't see this stuff.

What does he see? Like, if you're Elon Musk, what's coming across the transom to you every day? What's the mindset that you're going into this with? You have to remember, this is someone who tweets now easily 150 times a day, sometimes 200. That's a lot of just tweeting. He's consistently on his phone constantly.

for hours, but his worldview is shaped by what is on X and who he follows on X. And it's a lot of conspiracy theorist accounts. It's far right accounts. It's his favored folks who clip up his interviews and make him into memes and that kind of thing. And it's just kind of this positive feedback loop that he gets. And as someone who is the most followed account on X now,

he can drive conversations on that platform. You know, he says something and it becomes the news of the day. But by and large, he is someone that, you know, has shaped his own information ecosystem. And that's what he sees every day. I'm looking at polling that shows that what Elon is doing with Doge is broadly unpopular, right? This is a Washington Post, Ipsos poll, 49% disapprove, 14% not sure, 34% approve.

How does Elon respond to criticism, to people disapproving of him? He'll say that that is, gosh, I hate this term, fake news. Those polls aren't real. And that the real polls are X polls. And if you want to hear the people's voice, let's take an X poll. And I'm actually going to run one myself. Do you approve of Joe's yes or no? The folks on X are kind of self-selecting at this point. It's his home crowd.

And he's going to abide by the results of that poll. And that poll will probably be very favorable to him. And that's his response. There is not going to be a true debate on the numbers. He'll engage in his own information bubble. He'll get what he needs from his followers. And that's all the affirmation that he'll need. You've covered him for a long time. Have you ever seen anything stop him? Embarrassment. It's odd to think about, but he in some ways is very human.

And when he feels like he is disliked or embarrassed, he can lash out or, you know, it clearly gets to him. I remember one scene from our book when he had taken over Twitter and to blow off some steam, he goes to a Dave Chappelle show in San Francisco. And Dave Chappelle brings him out on stage. And...

Everyone just boos him, like boos him for minutes on end. And he just stands there and he tries to crack jokes. Dave Chappelle tries to calm them down with jokes. And they're just not having it, just constant boos.

He leaves and he comes back on stage, he gets booed again. And that was like, in some ways, very... It affected him, right? It caused him to go into this tailspin. At one point, he had a tweet right after the event that was like, you know, it was 90%...

cheers 10% booze and everyone just made fun of him for it and like he deleted it which is like kind of a tell in a way and Our reporting at the time showed like that really affected him and and at this point he is so rich And so unaccountable, you know, we can think about the typical ways that might hold someone accountable like that like the courts of law but he is he's gonna challenge that he's gonna hire the best lawyers and

He's going to test those theories and he is probably going to come out on top. There's one thing that is looming in the future that I've been thinking about a lot is the March 14th deadline for the government to shut down if there's not a spending bill. And the Democrats seem to be maybe slowly coalescing around some strategy that they will not vote to fund the government.

If congressional power slash Doge remain in the way that they are right now with Doge cutting federal agencies for things that were congressionally appropriated, what would Elon do if that's the sticking point? Like if it is the government shuts down or Elon Musk goes away, how does he react? He'd react by, again, this is my prediction, by,

the Democrats. He says, you're not going to bully me. I am executing Trump's will. This is what the people voted for. We've seen that message multiple times over. It wasn't a secret that I was an advisor to President Trump. I was with him every step of the way in the late stages of the election. People knew who I was and they voted for this and they voted for me. And therefore, I'm going to stick around. And actually, you, the Democrats, are

are the enemy of the people. You are forcing our government to shut down and I will take you to task. I will hammer you on X. I'll do everything in my power to destroy you. And he's not going to relent. There's no way of negotiating with him, right? It's either his way or complete destruction. Ryan Mack, as always, I learned so much talking to you. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Mack is a technology reporter for The New York Times. He and Kate Conger wrote the book Character Limit about Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, and I highly recommend it. All right, that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And I'm going to level with you. Right now, journalism is under threat.

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All right, we will be back on Sunday with another episode all about egg prices. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening. Get that Angel Reef special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show...

Everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years.

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