21 Tech Experts Resign From DOGE After Refusing To ‘Dismantle Critical Public Services’
‘We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions,’ the workers said in a mass resignation letter.
Does this signal cracks in DOGE ?
A cadre of nearly two dozen civil service workers have resigned from their positions at the Department of Government Efficiency saying that they refuse to allow their technical know-how to be used to “dismantle critical public services.”
A total of 21 engineers, data scientists, and product managers made their declaration in a joint resignation letter made public on Tuesday.
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The resignation is just the latest setback for a tech-driven purge of federal workers and comes amid a multitude of legal challenges filed in court against the efforts of DOGE.
The legal woes come as federal agencies, including many run by Trump cabinet picks, pushed back against his hack-and-slash tactics, urging their employees not to respond to a recent email that asked them to justify their jobs by drafting bullet points on what work they had accomplished in the past week.
Also on Tuesday, Press Secretary Leavitt, responded to a question about the reports of agency heads not being made aware in advance of the email being sent out to workers.
“Nobody was caught off guard,” she said, prompting a follow-up for a CNN reporter.
“A few departments said they were caught off guard,” Jeff Zeneny said. “The FBI was. The DOJ was…”
“Did anonymous sources say that or did the cabinet secretaries say that,” she responded before claiming that the reports were leaked by “career bureaucrats” and that “everybody was working as one team.”
Mr. Musk initially took to X over the weekend to say that not responding to the email by a deadline of midnight on Monday would be considered a tendered resignation.
Despite the backlash, he has doubled down on his stance with another ultimatum on Tuesday just after the original midnight deadline had passed.
“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” he said in a post on X.
“Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
The workers, all of whom previously held roles at tech companies like Google and Amazon before joining the previous iteration of DOGE, the United States Digital Service, also claimed in their resignations that Mr. Musk has enlisted political ideologues that lack the skills of experience needed to reduce the size of the federal government.
The day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the nonpartisan staffers were called to a series of interviews with unidentified people wearing White House visitors’ badges in which they were grilled about their political ideology.
“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”
Forty staffers were already laid off earlier this month making it difficult for the remaining 65 staffers to administer and safeguard its own technological footprint before a third of them quit on Tuesday.
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
The White House has dismissed the impact the mass resignation would have on DOGE’s operations.
“Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years,” Secretary Leavitt said.
“President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers.”
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