How Enablers Support DOGE

DOGE are not a collection of super-hackers. They don’t trick their way into agencies through side doors. Rather, they are almost always invited in by a senior leader who authorizes them with wide-ranging access and supports them if they need to steamroll any opposition. I call this category enablers, and they aren’t always DOGE associates (for instance, Marco Rubio or other appointees are often enablers). This page doesn’t list all the enablers for DOGE’s activities in the federal government, but it does list those that come from within DOGE’s orbit. The next page contains more details about each enabler, but it’s important to also understand two common ways in which DOGE Enablers are able to bypass legal and process safeguards to supercharge DOGE’s access.

Acting Leadership

In one of its more novel tactics, the Trump Administration has repeatedly used acting directors as the mechanisms of agency destruction. Because many agency directors require Senate confirmation before they can be appointed and this process takes time, the Vacancies Act was passed to ensure continuity of operations when during a change of administration or when an agency leadership position is vacated. This act allows the President to name people as “acting” directors or other positions who are granted full powers until a Senate-confirmed appointee can be sworn in. Using this loophole, the Trump administration is able to place high-level staff in agencies without having to go through Senate confirmation.

The Vacancies Act does set some conditions for who can serve as acting directors:

• By default, the “first assistant to the office” (i.e., the deputy director) fills the position
• However, the President may direct a person serving in a different Senate-confirmed position to serve as the acting officer
• Alternatively, the President can select a senior officer of the same agency to be acting director, provided they are at a certain high level and have been at the agency for more than 90 days

In the past, Acting Directors have largely acted as custodial roles, ensuring the operations of the agency continue but usually not making any major changes, since they are filling the seat until the real director can come in. The general assumption has been that agency directors would feel some loyalty to their staff or responsibility to be good stewards of the agency that has been entrusted to their care. The standard practice before this year for government transitions has been that an agency head appointed by the previous administration resigns on Inauguration Day and their deputy or another designee identified during the Presidential transition then serves as acting director until a permanent appointee is sworn in. To give an idea, here is the list of acting officials on January 20th, almost all of whom were current acting officials.

The Trump administration has dramatically upended this practice, using Acting Directors as a way to significantly change or even completely demolish other agencies. For the destruction of USAID, Trump fired the agency’s acting head and then declared the recently appointed Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, as the new acting director. Rubio then authorized all the activities of DOGE to demolish the agency. Similarly, within hours of being sworn in as director of the OMB, Russell Vought was named the acting director of the CFPB and ordered similar actions. This tactic has been instrumental in the DOGE takeover at many agencies - in their first acts, the acting directors usually order that DOGE staff are given superuser access and that normal processes for approval should be bypassed and staff be placed on administrative leave so they can’t prevent or observe what is happening. It’s a bit like a bank heist where the branch manager is spearheading the crime.

Chief Information Officers

In February, OPM urged agencies to reclassify how Chief Information Officers are hired, with a rule change that makes it easier to fill the position with private sector staff. Since then, several of the DOGE crew have been named directly to the title of Chief Information Officer, giving them authority over IT resources at their agency, in a few cases after the current CIO has been ousted by agency leadership. In some cases, they have used their positions to explicitly grant access to DOGE representatives at the agency. This table only list direct authorizations that have been documented. Indirect influence has likely been more widespread.

Developing software for the federal government is different in many ways from the startup world. For instance, Privacy Act regulations have explicitly prohibited connecting systems together precisely because the American public doesn’t want a government panopticon system that gives insiders a “God” view of the public. While an agency’s Privacy Office and Chief Counsel will often determine what information sharing is legally allowed, the agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) usually oversees the technical mechanisms which ensure that compliance. Furthermore, the CIO is primarily responsible for tracking IT budgets and contracts, which makes them a tempting target to support DOGE’s mission of centralizing and controlling all spending and procurement at federal agencies. CIOs are often able to order elevated access for DOGE staff with minimal oversight, making them crucial to the work that wrecker teams do. Finally, CIOs have the ability to issue Risk Acceptance Memos (RAMs) whereby they will personally accept the risk for nonstandard technologies and bypassing normal compliance processes. These “get out of jail free” cards have been used successfully in the past to right IT projects that have gone off course, but they also are easily prone to abuse in the wrong hands.

So, it;s no surprises that DOGE’s work started with replacing CIOs in some key agencies with people sympathetic to DOGE’s aggressive actions and world view. As a particularly potent example oh ho, two DOGE staffers - Marko Elez and Aram Moghaddassi - at the Department of Labor were granted access to a highly-sensitive data system belonging to the Office of the Inspector General. This system contained sensitive data from Unemployment Insurance claims that DOGE wanted to scrape to use in anti-immigration efforts. Normally, such access would be out of the question, but an Executive Order issued on March 20 demanding widespread data access for DOGE explicitly declared that

the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary’s designees shall receive, to the maximum extent consistent with law, unfettered access to all unemployment data and related payment records, including all such data and records currently available to the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General.

Despite the order here, this data was still considered so highly sensitive that DOL counsel determined that access would need to be explicitly granted by the agency CIO. Conveniently enough, the agency had just appointed a brand new CIO a week before. His name? Thomas Shedd.