As one of his first acts after being sworn in, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by reorganizing and renaming an existing entity, the US Digital Services (USDS), as the US DOGE Service. And while some have noted that this version of DOGE moves away from the sweeping vision of deregulation outlined in a November Wall Street Journal op-ed, it’s a move that will give centibillionaire Elon Musk and his allies seemingly unprecedented insight across the government, and access to troves of federal data.
“It’s quite a clever way of integrating DOGE into the federal government that I think will work, in the sense of giving it a platform for surveillance and recommendations,” says Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University.
Soon after his election victory, Trump announced that he would form DOGE, led by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to provide ”advice and guidance from outside the government”—something that would generally require it be formed as a federal advisory committee. The idea was that DOGE would provide recommendations for how to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget. (Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Ramaswamy exited the DOGE project.)
Both Ramaswamy and Musk supported Trump during his campaign, but Musk emerged as one of the president’s most important financial backers, donating close to $200 million to the Trump-supporting America PAC. Additionally, he used the power of his own celebrity to drum up support for Trump both online and off, joining the president on the campaign trail and amplifying Trump’s messaging on X, the social media platform he owns. Almost immediately after the election, Musk began to take a central role in the transition, joining Trump on calls with foreign leaders and making staffing recommendations.
Meanwhile, Musk put out a call for people to work with DOGE online, and turned the Washington, DC office of his company SpaceX into a staging ground for the entity while bringing in other major figures from Silicon Valley to assist in the effort. Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen apparently joined the effort as a self-proclaimed “unpaid intern.”
But under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, committees of the sort DOGE seemed to be shaping up to have several legal requirements, including making all meetings publicly accessible and requiring a diversity of perspectives on the committee itself. By repurposing the USDS, which was already part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Trump managed to skirt both the requirements of a formal advisory committee and the Congressional oversight required when creating a new federal agency. In short, it meant DOGE would get more access to sensitive data than an advisory committee would likely have, while offering less transparency.
The USDS was created by former president Barack Obama to untangle dysfunctional or failing technology across the federal government in the wake of the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov. The Service’s mandate allows it the wide-ranging ability to enter any government agency and access its software or technical systems with the goal of helping to streamline or reform existing systems.
Under the executive order, DOGE teams, which “will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney” will be dispatched to various agencies. They will be granted “access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” ostensibly with the goal of streamlining data sharing across federal agencies.
A former USDS employee who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity called the repurposing of the Digital Service an “A+ bureaucratic jiujitsu move.” But, they say, they’re concerned that DOGE’s access to sensitive information could be used to do more than just streamline government operations.
“Is this technical talent going to be pointed toward using data from the federal government to track down opponents?” they ask. “To track down particular populations of interest to this administration for the purposes of either targeting them or singling them out or whatever it might end up being?”
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It appears, however, that the first order of DOGE is to weed out people in agencies that might push back on the Trump administration’s agenda, starting with existing USDS staff, and hire new people.
“DOGE teams have a lawyer, an HR director, and an engineer. If you were looking to identify functions to cut, people to cut, having an HR director there and having a lawyer say, ‘Here’s what we’re allowed to do or not do,’ would be one way that you would facilitate that,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, noting that DOGE’s potential access to federal employee data could put “them in some sort of crosshairs to be fired.”
When Musk took over Twitter, he brought in outside help from his close circle as well as his other companies to transform the company, a move he appears to be repeating.
Who exactly is going to be part of DOGE is a particularly thorny issue because there are technically two DOGEs. One is the permanent organization, the revamped USDS—now the US DOGE Service. The other is a temporary organization, with a termination date of July 4, 2026. Creating this organization means the temporary DOGE can operate under a special set of rules. It can sequester employees from other parts of the government, and can also accept people who want to work for the government as volunteers. Temporary organizations can also hire what are known as special government employees—experts in a given field who can bypass the rigors of the regular federal hiring processes. They’re also not subject to the same transparency requirements as other government employees.
In the best case scenario, this would allow DOGE to move quickly to address issues and fast track necessary talent, as well as build systems that make government services more seamless by facilitating the flow of information and data. But in the worst case, this could mean less transparency around the interests of people working on important government projects, while enabling possible surveillance.
“I think part of the reason they’re wanting to use special government employees is because so long as they all work less than 60 days, the financial reporting requirements are less, which is going to be attractive to billionaires who have a lot of financial things they don’t want to disclose,” says Nick Bednar, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law. “And with agency approval, these individuals are allowed to continue contracting with the federal government if they represent, say, a corporation that has a lot of contracts with the government.”
Musk alone has over received billions of dollars via contracts with the federal government through his company SpaceX.
“To me, [the temporary organization] suggests there’s some sort of, there’s some reason for that which probably has to do with skirting disclosure and conflicts of interest requirements,” claims Moynihan.
Noah Kunin, former infrastructure director at the General Services Administration, tells WIRED that “the government has access to incredible amounts of sensitive or proprietary business information that [businesses] had to share with the government in order to get a contract or take some action.” And while not everyone gets to access this—it generally requires some form of clearance and government employees are not supposed to share it—this kind of information could be particularly useful to someone like Musk or other members of the business community who might be brought into DOGE.
“You always have concerns whenever you have private sector individuals entering government for a temporary position,” says Bednar. “This is how regulatory capture occurs.”
Even with all these special maneuvers, DOGE will likely still face hurdles. Sharing data across government departments and systems is tricky, particularly when different laws govern different agencies and the information they collect. Similarly, sensitive data often requires some form of government authorization, which DOGE volunteers and employees might not be able to get.
“There are legal restrictions to sharing data between organizations, and those agreements take an enormous amount of effort to put into place,” the former USDS employee says. “There are tons of examples of obstacles to information sharing like that. So maybe this is more aspirational than it is possible.”
“DOGE has just sort of added this element of unpredictability to what happens next in government,” says Moynihan. “It could be a bipartisan effort to make government technology work better. It could be an oligarch extracting resources from the government. We just really don’t know. We’re all gazing at tea leaves right now.”