The federal tech workers facing down DOGE

What it's like to be a federal worker during the dark days of Elon Musk's DOGE campaign

Over the last few weeks, as Elon Musk and DOGE have infiltrated government agency after government agency, proclaiming their intent to slash budgets, cut jobs, and embrace AI, we’ve watched a brazen, extralegal effort to hollow out the state unfold in real time. Now up to 200,000 workers are being targeted in mass layoffs. Much of the collective horror has stemmed from the broader implications this campaign—orchestrated by an unelected tech billionaire who has enriched himself with government contracts—has for our democracy. It has after all been carried out with no congressional oversight and often in stark defiance of judicial orders. It’s been called a coup, or an autogolpe, a coup from inside, or American authoritarianism.

But it’s also happening to real people, who are experiencing it all in excruciating, real-time dread. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking with federal tech workers about what’s happening, how they’re processing it, and how they’re pushing back. I’ve spoken to workers representing the full spectrum: From 10-year veterans to first-year tech workers in their probationary periods—and thus more vulnerable to termination—and from different departments across the government.

I wanted to share some of their stories, with their permission, because they help illuminate what’s going on at the personal level—even while we’re justifiably preoccupied with the ramifications for democracy writ large and the assault on our institutions. (I am, for the obvious reasons, keeping them all anonymous here, but have individually confirmed each of the sources.)

“I think maybe the thing that's not coming across in all the narrative so far is that federal workers are not just federal workers,” one veteran federal tech worker told me. “We are citizens and voters too, and we are targeted in many ways beyond just our work lives.”

Daniel Huizinga. Flicker, Creative Commons.

---

Before we go on: Blood in the Machine is 100% funded by paying subscribers. If you find this reporting and analysis valuable, consider becoming a paid supporter to make more of this work possible. And thanks as always for reading.

---

The cuts and the intrusions are affecting federal workers of every stripe, but tech workers have often been on the front lines, the first to be approached by DOGE agents as the caretakers of our federal digital infrastructure and the operators of our information systems.

“Right now it feels like we're being hacked from the inside,” one federal tech worker told me. “Like the ‘HR’ emails we get that have to be manually marked as not spam by IT. And they insist on immediate action, which is also a warning sign of a phishing email. Then people wanting privileged access to systems they don't have rights to, without proper (or indeed any) credentials.”

I ask another how he’s doing—an admittedly dumb question, but what do you say?

“Oh you know, watching an autogolpe from the inside,” he replies. “Feeling ten years of painstaking work to build up culture and credibility around digital transformation in the government get burned to the ground in less than three weeks.”

“Fearing for my job, fearing for my family's safety,” he says. “You know, the usual.”

That anxiety is omnipresent.

“[It’s] a very scary time. I'm gonna work on a private sector resume this weekend,” one junior federal tech worker told me.

That fear is being compounded by multiple factors. There is of course the DOGE directive to cut as many jobs as possible—most recently, WIRED reports that DOGE has attempted to lay off every single technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and are trying to push cuts through the Department of Education, the General Services Administration, and beyond. All this is leading to chaos and confusion on every level: Some employees who were told they were going to be fired have still received no official notice, workers who’ve taken the ‘fork in the road’ offer of 8 months paid severance are unsure whether they’ll ever see it, and not even DOGE seems to know (or care) if what it’s doing is legal.

“I will also say that as the Thursday deadline [for the initial fork in the road offers] approached OPM sent out these increasingly desperate emails that felt like nothing so much as a Democratic candidate at a fundraising deadline,” one worker told me. He says his team of over a dozen will soon be down to just a handful of employees. Another tells me that people of color are disproportionately being targeted for layoffs in their department. But DOGE is also trying to winnow staff through other means, too: Demanding a return to office, even for those hired as remote workers and who have never stepped foot in a government office, while at the same time, instructing the GSA to sell off or close federal buildings—making it even harder for employees to find an office to come into.

It all underlies the callousness at the heart of DOGE’s campaign, and the fact that this is an effort to hollow out the state, the firings unfurling often regardless of what a person or department really does.

“I am not a career-long gov employee by any means but even I can feel how the bedrock assumptions of what we do are being swept away,” a federal technologist told me. “Like clearly the people in charge have no interest in the missions of the agencies and there isn't any recourse to stay the courts, as far as we can tell.”

“If they even sweep away USAID, the velvet glove of US imperialism, because they occasionally piss off Putin and Orban,” he adds, “then it's not clear how much hope there is for things like clean air and food stamps.”

“I had BigBalls in a meeting,” another worker told me. "When I saw him I balked, and I thought 'Oh hey, someone brought their teenaged son to work today.' He showed up along with some others, and was not introduced as anything but an advisor." In fact, that was one of the leading DOGE officials, wielding significant power over the US government.

“It really feels like all of the work that we do as feds is so undervalued,” a junior tech worker says. “It's incredibly demoralizing to see outsiders come in and completely trample norms.”

DOGE agents really do appear to believe that many if not most of these jobs can be done by AI. “AI is one of the things the new management,” a federal tech worker says, “sees as a priority for our technology funding. It comes up often. They all see it as the way to do government without people, and I'm sure you can imagine how I feel about that.”

This week, Musk and Trump notched up the pressure. Trump signed an executive order (EO) that expanded DOGE’s powers, and ordered nonmilitary agencies to submit plans for mass reductions in force (RIFs). On Friday, February 14th, the RIFs began. But all this is happening, the workers emphasize, alongside an assault on trans rights, migrants, public education, and more. And this is what one federal worker tells me is the worst of all. I’ll quote them at length here, because this story, if I’m being honest, just about broke me:

My work life is subject to the EOs involving DOGE and RIFs, sure. And there's cartoonishly clumsy and evil people carrying out those orders in ways that defy the law, and also logic, and claim they're saving tons of money and finding tons of waste, fraud, and abuse when the reality is that they're inflicting it.

It would be one thing if "put them in trauma" as Russ Vought said, was only happening at work. But I have a teacher wife, and a teenage trans son.

So there's the school EO that paints my high school English teacher wife as a radical gender ideology indoctrinator, because she makes her class a safe place for trans kids to be themselves and learn, and suggests that she should be driven out of the profession.

And then there are... how many... 7? 10? EOs referencing trans issues, starting from the very definition of gender itself, that seek to drive my son out of public life.

Health care? No. Jobs? No. Passports? No.

These resemble the Nuremberg laws that steadily stripped Jews of their citizenship and finally personhood.

We are a family of Jews. The lessons of the Holocaust are burned into us at an early age.

So while I'm feeling the trap closing at work, I'm also feeling it close around the country as a whole.

My son happens to have his SSN, birth certificate, and passport all saying he's male; that took a couple years, and at the end we expedited the passport and got it right before inauguration. OK, fine, at least it doesn't say X for gender on his passport, so that's good right? But there are records that the change was made.

How long will it be before he's no longer allowed to use that passport?

What about healthcare?

Well, my son was bullied, suicidal, and hopeless for a couple of years in high school before we pulled him out, and after a miserable year in an online high school, he took a high-school equivalency exam in CA that let him move on and figure out what's next. The only reason we got this far was that we also started him with gender-affirming care: Therapy, medication, and yes, hormone-replacement therapy.

Why were we able to do that? Because my generous federal health insurance, the only insurance we have, covered gender-affirming health care.

And now all that hangs in the balance.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that by all counts, the assault on federal workers has inspired a surge of interest in organizing—everyone’s talking about it, the tech workers tell me. There are Signal chats lighting up, a spoon revolt—where federal workers used spoon emojis to mock the fork in the road emails—and harried efforts to formally unionize among those who have not yet done so, and to find the right union reps through which to push back. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) says that its membership has risen to the highest levels in its history. In response to the mass layoffs, its president, Everrett Kelley, issued a statement condemning the Trump administration’s actions:

"Despite OPM's guidance earlier this week advising agencies not to engage in sweeping terminations, the administration has plowed forward. Employees were given no notice, no due process, and no opportunity to defend themselves in a blatant violation of the principles of fairness and merit that are supposed to govern federal employment…

"AFGE will fight these firings every step of the way. We will stand with every impacted employee, pursue every legal challenge available, and hold this administration accountable for its reckless actions.."

Elsewhere, federal workers are engaging in lower key acts of refusal and resistance; declining to let DOGE officials access systems, and throwing up whatever roadblocks are possible to stop them from ingesting private information.

What’s especially galling about much of this is that many of these tech workers are there because they believe in the now-erstwhile mission of improving the ways that government can serve the public, because they love the work, and their country—and they gave up much higher salaries of the sort they could find in Silicon Valley and the private tech sector to do it.

“This has been the best job I've ever had; every sacrifice was worth it because I found my people,” one tech worker told me. “People who also cared to make the government work better for people and had explicitly chosen this path. It's crushing to see how quickly it can be shredded by people who cannot even understand the concept of public service, or why anyone would choose it.”

And the toll is already wearing on many. According to the Trump administration, 75,000 workers have already agreed to the fork in the road offer. Others are all but sure they’ll be forced out, too.

“It's just exhausting and even though I'll be able to muddle through a moderately lengthy period of unemployment it's crappy to be in my mid-50s contemplating another career change,” one tech worker told me. And this happening all across the nation, at nearly ever department of the federal government. The point, many are sure, is to shrink it, even to kill it.

“It seems increasingly likely that they will continue to make the job harder and more miserable,” the tech worker says. “At a certain point with these guys it may be that working to make the gov work better isn't a positive thing.”

---