Attacking the Civil Service

Probably DOGE’s biggest success so far has been their efforts to inflict “trauma” (as Russell Vough expressed this goal) on the federal workforce. From the first day, DOGE has staffed a large contingent at the OPM, with many of them coming from legal or human resources backgrounds with Musk’s various companies. The work against federal employees has included by specific legal and policy actions as well as data mining to identify groups that can be more easily fired.

This work has involved the following distinct strands:

• Firing Probationary Workers: In the Federal government, employees who have been in a particular role for less than a year are called “probationary” and have fewer protections against dismissal. As Noah Peters has testified, DOGE identified early that this rule could be hacked as a way to quickly fire a large number of civil service employees. To this end, the OPM requested in the first week that DOGE should send lists of probationary employees for analysis and then pushed to have them all fired. Judges have not been as impressed by this trick, and several have ruled that OPM overstepped its bounds and had no legal basis to order these reductions.
• The Fork in the Road: Copied directly from the playbook that Elon Musk used at Twitter, DOGE built an email system at OPM called the Government-Wide Email System (GWES) and used it to email every federal employee with an offer to take a deferred resignation offer by replying to an email with the word “resign.” This sparked widespread confusion, with many employees unsure if the offer was legal or would be honored by the administration. Ultimately, only 75,000 employees accepted the offer, below the administration’s goal of 5-10% of the federal workforce. Since then, the administration has brought back the offer at specific agencies, where staff have been more receptive after dealing with other insults and indignities in their agencies for months.
• Reductions in Force: DOGE has also been an essential part of the administration’s efforts to force widespread layoffs (called Reductions In Force or RIFs), supporting those efforts in multiple ways. This includes crafting the policy and instructions at the OPM and approving “emergency” exemptions to let agencies bypass normal procedures. One of the DOGE engineers, Riccardo Biasini, has also been reportedly working on improving an AutoRIF package for automating the selection and processing of employees for layoffs. DOGE has also sent workers into the field to conduct RIFs from within agencies. Trump’s executive orders have given DOGE teams extreme control over hiring and firing at many agencies, and they’re often the source of the arbitrary layoff targets (5000! 10,000!) that agency heads will announce without any of the careful consideration of critical services that the RIF process is supposed to include. DOGE staff have also been directly involved with layoffs within agencies. For instance, Jordan Wick and Gavin Kliger ran layoff preparations at the CFPB, and more recently Nate Cavanaugh has led forays into multiple small independent agencies to wrest control of their leadership and immediately conduct layoffs.
• Five Things: After Elon Musk went on a tweeting tear one Saturday night, DOGE workers at OPM quickly launched another demand for federal workers: they would be required to send an email every week of five things they had done the prior week or be fired. It turns out that a management technique they used for 2000 or so employees at Twitter does not scale very well for a bureaucracy of 2+ million employees, some of whom are out in the field or working on confidential and classified subjects. Agencies were caught completely by surprise and had to figure out how staff should respond, and OPM had to quickly concede that current policy stated that email responses to the GWES were optional and non-identifying. After a week of confusion, they amended the Privacy Impact Assessment for the GWES to accept emails, and instructed staff to continue sending the emails. It’s still unclear what they have been doing with them - there was a rumor that they would use AI to build an org chart or analyze who is valuable within the workforce - but my sense is they were following the Silicon Valley playbook of collecting large amounts of data and then figuring out what to do with it (this is totally opposite what the Privacy Act allows, of course). Within a month, the five things email had already become a joke, another example of DOGE rolling out a poorly-conceived idea without a plan or considering the consequences.

Despite many of these setbacks and haphazard roll-outs, attacking the bureaucracy has been one of DOGE’s most successful projects. It has directly reduced and traumatized the workforce and indirectly has damaged how government works, with ripple effects from understaffing becoming visible months after the damage has been done. I have been using the “disruption” tag (tagged with a icon) to record reports of DOGE’s damage at agencies; the majority of these are direct results of understaffing and randomized firings.

This work has probably involved access to the following systems: