President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has been re-interviewing existing employees in a White House tech team since Trump changed its name from the U.S. Digital Service to the United States DOGE Service after taking office, according to people familiar with the internal happenings.
The organization was originally set up in 2014 in the wake of the Healthcare.gov crash as a technology SWAT team that could deploy out to struggling government agencies.
Now, Trump is using the USDS for the DOGE, a project being led by billionaire Elon Musk to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” as Trump wrote when he announced the effort last fall.
The DOGE has been interviewing current employees with asks ranging from the completion of technical assessments to questions about what they’re working on, if they would move to D.C. and why the organization isn’t delivering, according to two former USDS team members now working elsewhere in government and internal USDS Slack communications viewed by Nextgov/FCW.
There’s a fear among USDS staff about being assessed for their loyalty, one said. Media reports of feds at the National Security Council being asked about their political affiliations have garnered criticism.
USDS employees were not re-interviewed at the start of the first Trump administration or the Biden administration, according to two former USDS employees. Each worked in USDS during one of those transitions.
Employees at USDS have fewer protections than traditional civil servants, as they’re members of the “excepted service” brought in for term appointments that last from two to four years, said Jenny Mattingley, Vice President of Government Affairs at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. Hiring people into the excepted service is also generally more streamlined and flexible than hiring traditional feds.
What we know so far about how the DOGE will work
How this new DOGE focus — and a new organization set up within USDS — interplay with USDS as it has been remains to be seen. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Throughout its history, USDS has worked on projects like fixing the website of the Social Security Administration or helping with the IRS tax tool set up under the Biden administration.
“They’re smart to put [DOGE] there,” said civic tech leader Jennifer Pahlka, who was involved in the creation of USDS. “I think it’s a sign that the new administration values that team and the competencies they have.”
Trump’s USDS executive order also set up a “temporary organization” within USDS to advance the “DOGE agenda” through Trump’s pre-set 2026 end date for the DOGE. That means that current USDS employees may soon have new volunteer colleagues, something Musk has indicated an interest in already.
Using the temporary organization designation will allow the DOGE to bring in volunteers with a “pretty broad mandate,” in addition to employees, said Mattingly, noting that she’d never seen the authority used before. The statute allowing for this type of setup does tie volunteers to some conflict of interest requirements.
The DOGE executive order tasked the new USDS with a “Software Modernization Initiative” to improve government software, network infrastructure, IT systems and their interoperability. On paper, that focus aligns with much of what USDS has been working on. Some people in the USDS community are embracing the DOGE and the change it brings, said one former USDS employee who is still in government.
“USDS has eliminated billions of dollars of wasteful IT spending and made agency operations more efficient,” the organization’s most recent administrator Mina Hsiang told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. “Given the common goals, a relationship with DOGE isn’t completely surprising, but housing all DOGE staff in USDS very much is.”
Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator of USDS, said that he was surprised to read the executive order and see how much it aligned with his “wish list” for USDS when he was setting up the organization.
The order “appears to significantly empower USDS to do more… which is a meaningful opportunity if taken the right way,” said Hsiang, noting that “USDS must stay focused on solving real problems for ordinary people, and not become a partisan tool.”
The order also requires agencies to set up DOGE teams to implement the “DOGE agenda,” noting the teams could include “special government employees” — a designation meant for people with needed expertise to work for the government for only part of the year. It does have some ethics requirements attached to it, said Mattingly.
But in addition to the focus on tech, the DOGE or USDS also appear in other new executive orders, like one establishing a hiring freeze, which calls on the USDS administrator to help with a “plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.”
It’s still unclear where Musk will be situated and in what capacity for his work with the DOGE, although being a special government employee himself is a potential option. The answer for this and other questions about the organization’s setup has ramifications for ethics and conflicts of interest requirements.
Musk’s businesses have billions in contracting with the federal government, and Trump could give Musk an ethics waiver, as GovExec has reported. Avoiding the red tape of ethics requirements for Musk and the triggering of transparency laws have been a priority for Musk and allies in setting up the DOGE, the New York Times has reported.
“There are significant conflicts of interest concerns with CEOs and other business owners … proposing downsizing the agencies that regulate their businesses,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW already launched a lawsuit against DOGE alongside several other organizations, alleging that it is violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
During Trump’s first go-round, the USDS team found points of alignment with the administration. But there may be a fundamental incompatibility now between an organization long focused on making government work better and an administration and DOGE intending to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy,” one former USDS employee no longer in government told Nextgov/FCW.
“We hope the DOGE initiative is truly attempting to expand on the work of the U.S. Digital Service, and not simply using it as a trojan horse to avoid Federal Advisory Committee rules and enact an agenda that will hamper government operations,” Bill Shackelford, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said in a statement, pointing to plans to downsize the federal workforce.
There’s a worry among some in the USDS community about the intention behind a line in the executive order telling agency heads to give USDS full access to unclassified agency records and systems, especially how that could be wielded for more controversial policies like mass deportation, the former USDS employee said.
“We had our own version of that fear when I left in 2017,” said Dickerson.
“Creating an organization like this… increases your capacity to take actions, to do things — that’s the point of doing it,” he said. “Once you have more capacity, the choice of what actions you want to do matters a lot more.”
Others see the DOGE effort as another attempt to rework the government without understanding it.
“You naive little tech bros. We’ve been here before where Silicon Valley shows up and tries to tell the bureaucracy what to do and thinks that they know better,” one of the former USDS employees said.
