DOGE is both awful and insidiously brilliant

This is what a modern-day coup looks like

Update: Just after posting this, I learned that the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo directing that all agency Chief Information Officers be reclassified so that the positions can be filled by political appointees. This gives even more political control over digital access to the Executive Office of the President.

We still have federal elected officials: senators, congressional representatives. They are in DC, presumably sometimes in their offices, other times going to their colleagues’ offices, serving on committees, showing up to “working dinners”, convening and talking very seriously about policies and agendas and communications strategies. We also have, for better or worse, a duly elected president and vice president. And our president—if not our VP—has been awfully busy with his perverted Ender’s Game of playing government.

But as the saying goes, Follow the Money.

And right now, the money of the most powerful nation to have ever existed is in control of the richest man to have ever lived.

A few days ago, newly-confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent allowed Elon Musk’s team at the “Department” of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access the Treasury Department’s disbursement system; that is, to access the data within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which disburses U.S. Treasury payments. According to its website (which the new Administration may not have changed yet):

The Federal Disbursement Services provides payment services for more than 250+ federal agencies. Your federal income tax refunds; Social Security benefits; Supplemental Security income; Railroad Retirement Board benefits; veteran's pay, pension, and education benefits all come from the Federal Disbursement Services. Payments to federal workers, vendors, and grantees also come from the Federal Disbursement Services.

In fiscal year 2024, the Federal Disbursement Services issued more than 1.27 billion payments, (96.9% as electronic payments), totaling more than $5.45 trillion.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service also ensures that our federal debt payments are made on time.

Now this, this is power.

An influential group of DOGE employees are reported to be six computer engineers between 19 and 24 who did not go through any standard federal government hiring or onboarding process. Almost anyone that skilled and that young is impressionable and agreeable in the face of a promise of power. Their distinct motivations are unknown, but from the outside it very much looks like Musk has taken advantage of the energy and vitality of youth to form a loyal band of digital soldiers. This may not be fascism, but it sure smells like it: in 1922, the New York Times heralded Benito Mussolini as the “hope of youth” and “man of tomorrow”. Elon Musk, once called the “architect of tomorrow” is now truly coming into his own.

According to Treasury officials, DOGE is limited to “read-only” access to Treasury computer systems, but opposing Democrats do not believe this (neither does WIRED), and Musk himself has threatened canceling disbursements, suggesting that he does, in fact, have some “write” access. Even if he and his team are only scraping data, that’s the personal data of every single Treasury disbursement recipient: federal taxpayers, Social Security recipients, veterans, grantees, contractors and vendors, and so on.

How is this possible? In addition to the complete abdication of responsibility of newly-confirmed Treasury Secretary Bessent and the cuckolded and feckless Congress, DOGE’s access comes from a frankly ingenious takeover and reorganization of a relatively small but agile federal office created by Barack Obama: the U.S. Digital Service. It’s now known, of course, as the U.S. DOGE Service.

The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) was, up until January 20, 2025, an agency within the Office of Personnel Management that was created to bring government websites out of the internet stone age. Funnily enough, as of tonight (Feb 4, 2025), the old USDS website is still active. According to its 2024 Impact Report, the USDS employed 230 people in 2024 and had worked with over 31 agencies since its inception in 2014. Some of its projects included helping the Department of Homeland Security create an online service for processing naturalization paperwork, creating a website for purchasing COVID-19 tests, and, with the IRS, launching Direct File, to help taxpayers file their returns more easily.

One of the many executive orders Trump issued on the first day of his new administration was E.O. 14158: Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency”. This renamed the U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service and reseated it under the Office of the President as a temporary organization. This means DOGE is not necessarily subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). (It is, however, subject to the Presidential Records Act, whereby records must be maintained.) In addition, DOGE employees are “special government employees”, who are are not subject to the same ethics rules as other government employees. This includes a propitious rule exception that ostensibly allows special government employees to knowingly issue contracts to other government employees. That is, DOGE employees believe they are able to issue government contracts to each other. The potential for corruption is obscene.

I don’t know exactly what resources Elon has been able to take advantage of within the former U.S. Digital Service, but it’s telling that he has claimed to have eliminated the IRS Direct File system, one of USDS’s major projects. If someone wanted to gain access to as many government functions as possible as quickly as possible, they could do much worse than start their coup from a centralized service that either presently or previously had access to the online and digital assets of numerous agencies. That service would presumably also have institutional knowledge of and contacts within the digital policy offices of much of the federal government. If USDS provided Elon with all of these perks, it would be an admittedly brilliant opening move.

Project 2025 says nothing about the U.S. Digital Service, and obviously it says nothing about the nascent Department of Government Efficiency. It certainly doesn’t suggest that access to the Federal Disbursement Services should be handed over to non-career employees. Policy differences aside, there are very good reasons why committed, expert, career professionals are put in control of critical government services—the chances for catastrophic error are too large. Elon Musk must believe that his acolytes and business buddies are smart enough to avoid crashing the US economy in their quest to cut government spending—or, perhaps, their quest to direct payments more appropriately. It is astounding that one unelected man apparently has the power to hold our economy hostage, should he desire. And for all of the jokes and the teasing about the idea of meme-agency-DOGE, that power was gained so quickly, so effectively, and so easily. It won’t be nearly as easy to claw it back.