“This has to be a joke," a former U.S. Digital Service employee recalled thinking on January 20 after seeing President Donald Trump's executive order renaming her agency the United States DOGE Service—a reference to the Elon Musk-backed Department of Government Efficiency.
But when she and her colleagues were told at a meeting the following week that “the agency you joined no longer exists,” it was clear this was no comedy routine. Just a couple of weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, the technology designer and researcher—who had been working on projects with the Veterans Administration—was fired, along with a third of her colleagues, via an email from an anonymous DOGE account. And this week, 21 additional staffers resigned, saying they refused to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.” That includes efforts by DOGE to get more than 2 million federal workers to document their work or be fired.
The laid-off employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, but whose name is known to Fortune, has been surprised at how much grief she has felt since the firing. The stress and anxiety of the past few weeks, she said, has been “significantly worse” than after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her twenties and doing several rounds of failed IVF. “I have been a total mess,” she said, “because there’s no precedent, it’s so uncertain what’s going to happen next. And it’s happening to everyone around me.”
Founding members and both current and former employees of the U.S. Digital Service have told Fortune that DOGE’s actions are a “betrayal” of its predecessor’s mission. They say Musk and his allies have “weaponized” the office, which had been largely apolitical. According to its still-active website, the USDS hired “mission-driven professionals” mostly from the private sector, including Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google, for limited "tours of civic service" that typically lasted two years. These engineers, designers, product managers, and digital policy experts worked on projects in small teams with agencies including the Social Security Administration, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and the IRS.
The office's new incarnation, unofficially led by Musk, however, appears to be devoted to an entirely different mission: rapidly identifying spending cuts, canceling government contracts, and firing federal workers. Its team, staffed with Musk loyalists, has parked employees in federal agencies and demanded access to all the information available about where the money goes. The stated goal is to reduce the nation's annual deficit, redirect some of the saved money to other programs that are a greater priority, and to eliminate bureaucracy. "Just the interest on the national debt exceeds the Defense Department's spending," Musk said this week during a Trump administration cabinet meeting, adding that "If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt."
DOGE's work has already decimated the U.S. Agency for International Development, among other agencies. Many have complained that it has jettisoned vital programs in the process.
In the end, shoehorning an office devoted to helping government into one instead focused on dismantling it has been jarring and disappointing for many insiders.
One founding member told Fortune she joined DOGE's predecessor in December 2014 after colleagues at the health care tech company where she was working told her they were kicking off the new unit. They asked whether she would sign on to help, given her expertise in working with health care data—something sorely needed at agencies like Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. “I was one of the first product and engineering members and helped build that capacity out—best decision ever,” she said.
The goal, said the founding member, who left in 2018, was never just about efficiency. It was to help government operate better by solving complex technical challenges. “It wasn't like you come in and you strip a car for all of its parts,” said the worker, who requested anonymity for fear of blowback at her current private-sector job and whose identity is known to Fortune. Now she feels the U.S. Digital Service, like many federal offices, is a victim of DOGE's efforts to slash government services.
The White House press office did not respond to emails seeking comment about DOGE's work and the transformation of its predecessor.
Some former U.S. Digital Service employees have spoken out on social media. Anne Marshall, the director of data science and engineering for the USDS, previously spent 13 years in software engineering at Amazon. She announced her resignation this week after over a year in her role, saying on LinkedIn that she did not “believe that DOGE can continue to deliver the work of USDS, based on their actions so far.”
Naveen Eluthesen, a former software engineer at Amazon and Twitter who had been with the agency for a year and a half, was also among the 21 who handed in their resignations this week. He said on LinkedIn he had “helped millions of Americans retain their health insurance, helped hundreds of thousands of Americans retain their access to food stamps, and in the process saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year without cutting programs or firing government workers.”
The team was able to accomplish this before the takeover of DOGE, Eluthesen continued. “We are now all choosing to leave rather than to participate in the reckless, incompetent, and disrespectful ways DOGE is changing our government, which will result in decades of immeasurable harm done to millions of people at home and abroad.”
Itir Cole, who had previously worked in several senior technology product roles in the private sector, also resigned from the USDS this week after a year and a half in her role. She had been assigned to the CDC, working across software systems to track deadly diseases, from Anthrax to Zika.
“Public health experts use the system we built to investigate,” she said in a LinkedIn post. “The software is where the puzzle pieces come together.” On the day she resigned, she added, “nearly all of my team was fired, locked out of their computers without time to transition responsibilities. No real cause was given. No one in my chain of command was consulted.”
Cole said she was concerned for her colleagues. “They deserved better,” she wrote. “A single engineer on my team had more experience than the entire reported expertise of those on the DOGE team—at least of those willing to share their names.”
One legacy USDS employee, on staff since 2020, also spoke to Fortune, saying that he planned to tender his resignation later next week, as soon as he is able to wrap up the project at a government agency that he's still working on, but alone. The rest of his team was already fired.
The worker, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, recalled a meeting shortly before Trump's inauguration with Steven Davis, a Musk deputy tapped to oversee hiring at DOGE. Davis was previously a cost-cutter at Musk's X and his tunneling venture, the Boring Company.
The meeting, at the New Executive Office Building, part of the White House campus, didn't go as expected. “At the time I was still in this mode of, 'Okay, let’s be open-minded,'” he said. But instead of technical questions about IRS computer systems, Davis's questions focused almost exclusively on taxpayer fraud.
The current DOGE worker also recalled a meeting where nearly all USDS employees showed up to ask questions of Stephanie Holmes, who had identified herself as an HR representative for DOGE. Her response to an employee's question about future recruiting for USDS staff particularly stood out. “The only thing Stephanie Holmes wanted to talk about was to encourage people to take the deferred resignation offer and quit immediately,” he said, referring to President Trump’s offer to federal employees to quit in exchange for pay through September.
Current and former USDS employees Fortune spoke with said that Musk has never interacted with anyone in the unit who had shifted into DOGE. While Musk does not hold an official title, he's DOGE's de facto leader and operates as a senior advisor to President Trump.
After recent criticism about the ambiguity surrounding the leadership of the DOGE, this week Amy Gleason, a former senior advisor at the USDS who worked on the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, was named acting administrator of DOGE. In between government stints, she had been working as chief product officer at two health care startups founded by entrepreneur Brad Smith, who worked in the first Trump administration and has since been working with DOGE.
The USDS was created as a sort of White House–based startup in 2014, under President Obama, to tackle the complex technology challenges of some of America’s most critical public services. Its first big job was fixing healthcare.gov after its disastrous launch, when the site crashed as millions of people tried to log on.
The current DOGE employee expressed sadness about how things have played out. “It’s a shame to take something that was providing value and providing value cheaply, staffed with people who in many cases took a pay cut from private-sector jobs, doing work because they thought it was valuable and mission-oriented,” he said. “It seems silly to throw that away.”
He pointed to a USDS coffee mug he uses at his home, which lists six values the USDS was founded on—including “optimize for results, not optics.”
“We are not building careers in federal government,” he said. “Part of the reason you’ve never heard of USDS is because we intentionally don’t take credit for most of our work and give credit to agencies when they have successes. It’s all about results and having a positive impact.”
Meanwhile, the technology designer and researcher who was fired earlier this month said she is saddened by what she described as the “short-sighted” way DOGE is tackling the technology work and the systems the USDS had worked on for a decade.
“There's a part of me that hopes they are successful in improving the efficiencies and delivering more and better services through technology to the American people,” she said. “That is what we have all been trying to do. We've all been working our asses off to do this for years. Right now it just seems like they're just destroying everything.”
