One of the recurring themes we’ve seen when members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) show up at government agencies is active resistance from the people who work there. To cite just two examples, it happened recently at the U.S. African Development Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. On Friday and Saturday, it happened at a cabinet-level department–the U.S. Department of the Interior.
As the New York Times reports, Interior’s chief information officer and chief information security officer strongly objected when DOGE officials Stephanie Holmes and Katrine Trampe entered the building over the weekend and demanded unfettered access to “a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies.”
They had a plethora of concerns. The first was that no one at the Interior Department, including themselves, had the kind of global administrative access that Holmes and Trampe were demanding. The second was that having that kind of access would open Holmes and Trampe up as targets of terroristic cyberattacks or other malicious hacks. The third was that granting (or just having) that kind of access could violate the Privacy Act and be a prosecutable offense. The fourth was that it would allow them “to make changes to employment status, compensation level, health benefits and more — with no additional oversight or approval required.” The fifth was that any kind of administrative access to the payroll system “typically requires training and certification” and that “without formal qualifications, the Department may experience significant failure because of operator error.”
These concerns were drafted up in a memo on Friday.
On Friday, the federal employees asked the DOGE workers to give the memo to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for his signature, thus taking on the legal responsibility for those risks, the two people said. Mr. Burgum never signed the memo. Tyler Hassan, a former DOGE employee who was recently named as the Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget, then placed the agency’s chief information officer, and chief information security officer on administrative leave, and placed them under investigation for their “workplace behavior,” the two people said.
These security officers’ “workplace behavior” really consisted of trying to follow the law and protect the security of the system they are/were in charge of safeguarding. Their failure to just obediently follow orders from DOGE randos who showed up at their door making crazy and dangerous demands has led to them being put on administrative leave.
This kind of thing is now normal, and I only mention this particular iteration because it strikes me as a good way of seeing the problem. I think it’s obvious that anyone trying to protect their job and livelihood understands by now that it’s a bad idea to talk back when DOGE comes knocking. But we keep seeing it happen nonetheless because the things DOGE is asking for are so obviously problematic that conscientious and responsible government workers can’t bring themselves to just say ‘yes.’
In this case, they at least wanted to notify Secretary Burgum of all the reasons why he shouldn’t allow it and have him personally take responsibility for anything bad that might result. This was interpreted as insubordination of the fatal variety.
These things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.
