Who Has Left?

It has always been easier to track when DOGE staff have arrived at an agency vs. when they have left. For instance, when a wrecker like Gavin Kliger starts working at an agency, they might retain access (and an agency laptop) long after they’ve left the building. DOGE has also been purposefully opaque about departures, since they might puncture the aura of invulnerability they have been trying to project. But, with time and details that have emerged from reporting and court filings, we are starting to get a better picture of who has left agencies.

Finally, there are some DOGE staff who will have to depart the government in the future when they reach the Not-To-Exceed date for their positions. There are multiple reasons why a position might have a not-to-exceed date:

• Some staff have joined DOGE as Special Government Employees (SGEs). Those positions allow them to continue to be employed at their current job and to avoid ethics disclosures. These positions have a strict 130-day limit however.
• In many detailing arrangements where the employee of one agency is working in another, there often is a NTE date for the agreement.
• Finally, some positions might be hired under alternative (or excepted) methods (called schedules) that offer more flexibility in hiring compared to ordinary civil service jobs. Since these positions are not paths into the competitive civil service, they usually have a limit on their duration of 1-2 years, with a possible extension of a few years more. This was the method that 18F used to hire federal staff quickly and it seems like DOGE is using those same mechanisms at GSA and other agencies.

Here are the current positions which have NTE dates and have not ended (either through normal reasons or because they were replaced with another positions). This does not necessarily mean that the person is still working in that position; I only have limited visibility into DOGE’s staffing operations and it’s not always easy to know if someone has definitively left an agency.