They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world’s wealthiest online troll.

On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located. They were interrupted while trying the handles of locked office doors.

“Hey, can I help you?” asked an employee of the agency that was soon to be forced into bureaucratic limbo. The DOGE crew offered no clear answer.

Nearby, a frazzled IT staffer was rushing past, attempting to find a way to carry out the bidding of the newcomers.

“Are you okay?” an onlooker asked.

“This is not normal,” the staffer replied.

Similar Trump-administration teams had moved into the U.S. Agency for International Development the previous weekend to, as DOGE leader Elon Musk later wrote on his social network, feed the $40 billion operation “into the woodchipper.” A memo barred employees from returning to the headquarters building but made no mention of the other USAID offices, allowing some civil servants one last look at their desk before the guidance was revised.

“Books were open, and things had been riffled through,” one USAID staffer told us.

A second USAID employee said she had the same experience, finding signs “of activity overnight.” Her brochures and folders had been moved around. Panera cookie wrappers were left on her desk and in the trash can nearby, she said.

“It’s like the panopticon,” one USAID contractor told us, recalling a prison designed to let an unseen guard keep watch over its inhabitants. “There’s a sense that Elon Musk, through DOGE, is always watching. It has created a big sense of fear.”

The contractor said that she had placed her government laptop in her closet at home, underneath a pile of clothes, in case DOGE was using it to listen to her private conversations. She said that other colleagues were so paranoid, they had discussed stowing their laptop in their refrigerator.

Over at the Department of Education, the new strike force invited sympathetic witnesses to cheer their arrival. Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who had been appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as trustee of a Florida college, posted photos like a soldier on the front: the door of the building, a picture of the secretary of education’s office. “Such a cool vibe right now,” he wrote. “And everyone is waiting for the opening moves.”

Donald Trump wanted to act fast upon his return to power. He was determined to fundamentally change the institutions that so effectively constrained him during his first term. “I am your retribution,” he had promised on the campaign trail. This time he would be seemingly everywhere at once, the only public notice coming in unverified claims made by social-media accounts overseen by Musk and through leaks by the workforce that bore the brunt of the assault.

Undefined and hard to track, DOGE has claimed to be a new government department but operates more as a disembodied specter. Some of its emissaries, including Musk, have insisted they don’t work for DOGE at all, but for the White House directly as “special government employees.” Much of the cost savings that Musk has touted as DOGE victories on social media have been carried out by other appointees.

Over the first month of Trump’s new term, patterns have nonetheless emerged as a small crew of Musk’s young technologists worked their way through the federal workforce. This new unit has trained its initial attention on the key punchers who make the government work, executing Musk’s belief that by controlling the computers, one could control the entire federal bureaucracy. They’ve mapped systems, reworked communication networks, and figured out the choke points. Instead of taking command of the existing workforce, Trump’s new team has pressured them to disperse, firing those who were probationary, offering buyouts to others, and subjecting many others to 15-minute interviews in what many felt were juvenile tests of their worth.

The full impact of the blitz will not be known for months, when the courts and Congress decide where to push back—if at all. But the scale and speed of the transformation now taking place across the executive branch is likely to leave a deep mark. The civil service is built on the caution that comes from layers of rules, with the knowledge that the American people directly depend on the services provided. Reliability, however creaky, is typically paramount. Musk’s broader operation started from the opposite premise: Radical action was the only responsible course. The improperly fired could be rehired. The confusing memo could be withdrawn and replaced. The courts might overturn their actions, but that is a problem for another day. Make change happen, and rebuild the smashed shards later, if necessary.

This story is based on interviews with more than 25 current and former government workers, most of whom requested anonymity to avoid retribution or public targeting. They told the story of a chaotic few weeks when DOGE and its allies infiltrated their offices, with an endgame that is still being written. The first month of Trump’s second term may be the start of a government transformation on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, fundamentally remaking the powers of the president under the emerging authority of digital data systems. Or it could be the start of a constitutional crisis and the fracturing of the government systems upon which Americans rely.

The White House maintains that the DOGE transformation is being done securely, in full compliance with the law. “DOGE has fully integrated into the federal government to cut waste, fraud, and abuse,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told us in a statement. “Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people, and their obstructionist efforts will fail.”

Pushback within the government has already started to emerge. A top GSA engineer resigned this week when faced with orders to turn over root access to Notify.gov, the system that government agencies use to send text messages to citizens, because the file contained personal information, according to an internal message we obtained.

Outside observers have been watching with increasing anxiety, worried that the rush for change and the blunt-force methods will break something important that will hurt people who need services and take years to put back together.

“You are controlling technology pipelines, which is the modern-day equivalent of blocking the highway. You are controlling any in and out flow,” Ayushi Roy, a former technologist at the General Services Administration who now teaches digital government at the Harvard Kennedy School, told us. “You have to know where the breaker is and what the right order of switches is to turn the thing back on. I don’t know that they know where all the breakers and the mains are for this house yet, and they are letting go of all the people who do know.”

Democrats like to call him “President Musk”—following polling that shows the world’s richest man is less popular than Trump, and holds powers that make even one in five Republican voters disapprove. But White House officials, who lionize Trump for a living, dismiss the attack as a fundamental misunderstanding.

Musk is not the architect of the plan, they say, but its executor. Conservatives spent decades fantasizing about shrinking government down to the size it could be drowned in the bathtub. Musk’s big innovation is finding ways to get that done.

Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025 and the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, laid out the mission shortly after the election, back when Musk was still getting used to his guesthouse at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club. Vought called for a return to a pre-Watergate mindset—“a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.” There would be three prongs of the attack, he told Tucker Carlson during a November 18 podcast.

First, “the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out,” Vought said, giving the president complete control of the executive branch to impose his will. Second, the courts must be provoked to smash the idea that Congress directs spending. “Congress gets to set the ceiling. You can’t spend without a congressional appropriation, but you weren’t ever meant to be forced to spend it,” Vought said, dismissing the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which basically decrees the opposite. Third, the protections of the civil service must end, making nearly all of the federal workforce at-will employees.

This is where Musk entered under the banner of cost reduction, a useful side effect of the larger project. His major contribution, repeated to Trump and his advisers down at Mar-a-Lago, was to reject thinking about government as a lawyer would—a collection of institutions bound by norms, laws, and rules, and controlled by policy and decree. The bureaucracy does not easily bend to white papers. “The government runs on computers” soon became a mantra repeated by Trump’s advisers, who found themselves in awe of his enthusiasm and speed, even as they expressed annoyance at having to constantly clean up his messes, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Musk began wearing a T-shirt around the White House that said Tech Support to drive home the point. “One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Musk told Fox News in a joint interview with Trump on Tuesday.

His team focused on accessing the terminals, uncovering the button pushers, and taking control.

“He is kind of going after the nerve center of government,” said Amanda Ballantyne, the director of the Technology Institute at the AFL-CIO. “It looks like he’s using data and IT systems as a backdoor way to gain considerable discretionary power without normal, legal oversight.”

Musk recruited loyalists. They started with the data sets, the programs deep in the bowels of the government. They abided by no official hierarchy, and many of his employees worked out of a large conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, their backpacks strewn about. Steve Davis, DOGE’s unofficial chief operating officer, was a former SpaceX engineer who once owned Mr. Yogato, a D.C. frozen-yogurt shop where customers could win discounts by singing a song.

The targets of DOGE takeovers were often among the most obscure outposts of the federal government. But each had something that Musk’s allies needed. In previous changes of government, the employees of the Bureau of Fiscal Service, the paymaster of the federal government, had waited months for the new administration to even discover their existence. Now they found themselves fielding questions from Musk’s team during the transition about how things worked.

The General Services Administration, long thought of as the government’s landlord, took on new importance as the repository of massive data sets—about grants, contracts, even the personal identity verification cards that control access to federal buildings and workstations. The DOGE team sought access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System at the IRS, a point of entry for the tax-record master file and similar systems at the Social Security Administration.

Technologists who watched the work from the inside wondered if Musk had plans to impose new AI tools on the federal machine. They speculated about plans to create a massive “data lake” that connected the disparate bits and bytes of the federal government into one giant system. New Trump appointees tried to gain access to a U.S. Treasury system to stop payments from USAID, rather than simply ordering the agency to stop spending—a test case, perhaps, for mastering 23 percent of the U.S. GDP, the scale of the federal government, from a single keyboard.

Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer recently appointed as director of Technology Transformation Services at GSA, suggested a broader plan in an all-hands meeting on February 3 that was recorded and later shared with The Atlantic. “We want to start implementing more AI at the agency level and be an example for how other agencies can start leveraging AI,” he said, providing AI-powered coding assistants and federal contract analysis as examples. The ambitions raised security concerns. Government systems are hardened against outside attack but remain vulnerable to insider threats, veteran federal employees warned. Centralizing data could raise the risk.

“At present, every hacker in the world knows there are a small number of people new to federal service who hold the keys to access all US government payments, contracts, civil servant personal info, and more,” one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers. “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

Without a master AI at hand, the Trump team has worked agency by agency. One of the first tasks when they arrive is to get a full list of its contracts and grants, a person familiar with the process told us. “They are kind of like freelance henchmen,” observed the departed technologist who has been speaking with current officials directly interacting with DOGE. “They are going on little missions that Elon and Steve Davis are telling them to go on.”

Trump appointees have sometimes asked agency leaders for a one-line description of every contract, as well as who is responsible for it. Then they go through the list, highlighting contracts that they think might contradict one of Trump’s executive orders or require additional scrutiny. Those singled out then get put in different batches, by category, before ending up on the secretary’s desk, to make a final determination.

The process is error-prone. Employees at CFPB warned the newcomers that the telephone hotline for consumer complaints, operated by a contractor, was mandated by law. But for one day last week, it went offline, infuriating people on the inside of the frozen agency. It was reinstalled a day later. In other cases, the cuts sparked congressional backlash from key Republican members, forcing reconsideration.

At the Treasury Department, one of the Trump team’s first steps was simply to print out Government Accountability Office reports and go through them line by line, implementing the GAO’s recommendations for cutting spending and more, said a person familiar with the methods. The new team could also search whole contract data sets for supposedly “woke” words such as equity and diversity to target their cuts.

But the promise of digital supremacy can go only so far. Trump’s advisers encountered systems of what the incumbent engineers called “spaghetti code,” the product not of any grand design but of decades of revisions under new administrations and legal edicts.

Multiple agencies have as many as 20 to 30 different versions of code, sometimes decades old, a person familiar with the process told us. So even when one of Musk’s allies masters a system, the team cannot simply replicate it across the government. Musk has expressed disbelief at some of the government’s antiquated programs and the challenge of centralizing command and control. Speaking in the Oval Office last week, he described the process of manually retiring government employees using paperwork stored in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania, marveling that the “time warp” system restricted how many bureaucrats could retire each month.

Government veterans, who have spent decades toiling in the mines of government data, looked on knowingly. “If they are targeting the computer systems, when are they going to realize that the computers don’t work?” a veteran federal technologist asked us. “There are so many systems strapped together or held together by duct tape or literal humans. There are limitations to what you can do with a systems-first approach.”

Some of the engineers at the U.S. Digital Service, a strike team of technologists where Musk embedded his new operation, dared to harbor initial optimism that Musk could build something better. On January 20, USDS had projects running in at least 15 different federal agencies, including improving online passport applications and helping the Department of Veterans Affairs upgrade its app.

But it soon became clear that they were not invited to this new party. There would be two teams, the newcomers and those already there.

Within weeks of Trump’s arrival, the new technology leadership was telling federal employees to consider a modest buyout offer that arrived in an email titled “Fork in the Road,” an echo of a similar offer Musk had written to staffers when he took over Twitter.  

“In recent years, priorities have shifted from efficiency to ideology, and the agency has strayed from its mission,” Stephen Ehikian, the acting director of the GSA and a former Salesforce executive, wrote in an email to staff on Inauguration Day. Under his leadership, GSA could expect a “return” to “making government work smarter and faster, not larger and slower.”

“It was different in tone from anything I’ve heard from a government official,” one GSA worker told us. “It was very much: ‘You all have been slacking off, and we’re going to stop that.’”  

Probationary employees, including veterans of government service who had just taken new roles, were targeted as the easiest to dismiss, in many cases regardless of their qualifications. In at least one instance, a federal technology employee never received notice of apparent termination, the person said. The official’s computer and email were disabled. A supervisor thought initially that there might be an IT glitch. The word from human resources was to wait. Then the paychecks stopped.

Federal coders and product managers found themselves called into 15-minute interviews with the Musk newcomers, who were sometimes young enough to be their children and had a fraction of their experience. Employees received calendar invites to virtual meetings with nongovernment email addresses, were given only hours’ notice, and some were first asked to fill out a form describing recent “wins” and “blockers.”

The questions hit the same points across agencies, typically with variations on the wording—a request for a greatest-hits list of what employees had done, a probing of their capabilities. “Like, what’s your superpower?” a young Musk acolyte asked in an interview with one GSA employee, according to a recording obtained by The Atlantic. Some got quick coding tests. Others reported hearing questions that sounded like loyalty tests about what they thought of DOGE.

The uncertainty and chaos has left thousands of federal employees wondering what comes next and whether it will make more sense.

Last Wednesday, when a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling allowed the “Fork” buyout program to proceed, Department of Energy employees received an email at 7:18 p.m. alerting them of the ruling and saying they had until 11:59 p.m. that evening to make a decision about whether to resign, according to a copy of the email provided to us.

At approximately 8 p.m., Energy Department staff received another email saying that, in fact, “the Deferred Resignation Program is now closed” and that any resignations received after 7:20 p.m.—just two minutes after the initial email went out—would not be accepted.

One Energy Department employee told us that he was on the phone with fellow department staff, everyone agonizing over what to do, when the second email came in saying that, despite the midnight deadline, the window had already shut. He later told us that resignations had, in fact, been accepted until midnight.

The amateurish errors caused unnecessary chaos and scrambling in an already uncertain time, leaving many government employees wondering if casual cruelty was as much the point as the government overhaul itself.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.

DOGE has achieved “God mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more.

The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive information of countless Americans.

In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services, requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers we spoke with who are familiar with his request. With this level of control, Shedd would be able to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. (In a written statement, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for the General Services Administration, of which TTS is a part, said Shedd needs this level of access to rapidly identify “areas for optimization and efficiencies” and insisted that he is working with “appropriate GSA officials” to follow established protocols.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Over the past few days, we’ve talked with civil servants working for numerous agencies, all of whom requested anonymity because they fear what will happen if they lose their job—not just to themselves, but to the functioning of the federal government. Their observations reveal the abnormal degree of power that DOGE has already achieved. Federal agencies are subject to various forms of administrative and legal oversight, but they operate separately from one another for good reasons: to support a specialized purpose and to insulate them from undue outside influence. Now they effectively roll up to Elon Musk. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to requests for comment for this story. Earlier this week, a White House official claimed that Musk is not the head of DOGE. He is clearly the group’s functional leader.)

Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. (The Trump administration has sought to effectively shut down USAID since the inauguration.) But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere. At NASA, for example, it could mean access to knowledge about sensitive government technologies used for defense. At the CDC, such ability could expose millions of Americans’ health data and allow DOGE to access labs that store deadly pathogens. At Treasury, such access would allow Musk’s employees to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information. “It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States,” the senior USAID source said. “What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that.”

The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president.

One experienced government information-security contractor offered a blunt response to the God-mode situation at USAID: “That sounds like our worst fears come true.” The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government—that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.

“Once they’re in, they’re in,” the USAID employee told us. And this is a big part of the problem in a nutshell: Access is everything, and in many cases, DOGE has it.

At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.) Within USAID, DOGE has full access to human-resources information—Social Security numbers, addresses, reputational data such as performance reviews, plus classified information and disciplinary information. The USAID source noted that DOGE can also control USAID systems that help with disbursement of funds, building-access tools, and payroll: “If they wanted to change how much a person is making, they could modify that, given their access in the system.” According to the employee, DOGE is also inside of an internal system for managing contracts and grants, which functions like a high-security online marketplace where USAID plans and approves billions in government spending.

Inside NASA, according to one agency employee we spoke with, DOGE workers already have access to contracts, partnerships, performance reviews, classified national-security information, and satellite data, among other materials. The NASA worker told us that such knowledge could erase generations of advantage in aerospace and defense capabilities if it falls into the wrong hands. Agency technologies such as propulsion systems, novel materials, and satellites overlap with Department of Defense projects. Someone with information about NASA’s thermal-protection or encryption technologies could take advantage of vulnerabilities in aerospace vehicles, for example.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude ]

USAID employees have felt more acute effects of DOGE’s operations. Employees there say they have been rattled by the demands of DOGE engineers: “They have walked in and said to senior staff, You have 15 minutes to do this or you’re fired,” the USAID senior leader told us. Now USAID staff are “operating in a zero-trust environment.” With its God-mode IT control at the agency, DOGE can read emails and chats, plus see who’s attending which meetings. The source described employees in a recent meeting growing alarmed when transcription services seemed to turn on without warning. An employee at NASA reported similar concerns, after unfamiliar messages appeared on workstations. “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.

The senior USAID official fears that DOGE could terminate somebody working in a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia from an agency system. “If they lose access to their USAID laptop, phone, and accounts, for a lot of them that’s their only means of communication. We are putting their lives on the line,” one said.

For those who have watched DOGE storm into their workplace, what is perhaps most terrifying is its attempts to scale. If DOGE were to acquire God-mode administrative access across many systems, several sources told us, that level of control could affect every citizen at home, and many American interests abroad: personal financial data, defense secrets, and more, all in the palm of Musk’s hand.

There’s reason to believe that health information may be next. The Trump administration fired roughly 700 people at the CDC last weekend. As in other agencies, the firings will hollow out expertise but also remove obstacles to further changes. A CDC employee told us that the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is expecting DOGE, but “no one has seen anyone yet.”

The individual, who has knowledge of how CDC information systems work, fears that DOGE could gain access to an abundant store of sensitive information about health and disease. This year, the CDC is supposed to roll out a central data platform for public-health surveillance and emergency response to better address new threats such as H5N1 bird flu and old ones such as measles. The new system, called the One CDC Data Platform, promises to aggregate all of the CDC’s public-health data, including hundreds of thousands of daily anonymized lab tests, data from emergency-room visits, and measurements from wastewater disease-reporting sites.

The design and rollout of this system were already controversial inside the agency, our source said, even before Trump and Musk came on the scene. Putting everybody’s health data in one place carries risks. Although the health data the CDC houses are usually de-identified or aggregated, “people with very stigmatizing illnesses could be identified by certain characteristics” if the data are exposed or misused, the CDC worker said. What’s more, plenty of health data contain information that, when correlated with other data outside the system, could pinpoint specific individuals. Given all of the data that DOGE appears to be capable of siphoning from all over the government, such identification could become much easier. The CDC collects electronic health-record details from all over the country, meaning that this could affect just about everyone—including us, and you too.

CDC systems control more than mere information about disease. At the agency’s facility in Atlanta, the CDC stores the microbes that cause disease and can hold secrets to treatment. Some are relatively benign, such as strains of E. coli. Others are intrinsically dangerous, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and bacterium that causes tuberculosis. These materials are housed in labs with associated biosafety levels. The highest level, BSL-4, applies to only a small number of labs around the world containing “dangerous and exotic” microbes, as the CDC describes them, that pose a high risk of spread.

Access to such labs is managed by computers, and management of those computers is local to the CDC. If DOGE got the same kind of access to CDC IT systems as it has elsewhere, would that give the group direct access to CDC facilities? “Yes, those are all out of CDC level,” our source at the agency told us. Does that mean that DOGE could gain direct access to BSL-4 labs? we asked. “It’s definitely possible,” the employee said.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Our source hoped that such a prospect would be averted. (To repeat, DOGE hasn’t taken control of CDC IT systems yet, at least as far as our source knew.) But the employee also explained that the recent layoffs will reduce the agency’s ability to defend against IT or security errors, on top of diminishing morale. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about whether someone with full, local IT control could indeed grant entry to, or control over, BSL-4 labs and their contents.

The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects. Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up “reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.” NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.

A number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to limit DOGE’s access, with mixed results. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both attacked judges who have ruled against their interests; Musk has said they should be impeached. Trump has also indicated that he might just ignore the courts—an act that would be challenging to counter, providing plenty of opportunity for the administration to get its way. Across agencies, leaders have started to step aside voluntarily. Jim Jones, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned this week. Michelle King, who ran the Social Security Administration, stepped down too rather than carry out DOGE’s wishes. The resignations may be principled, but they open the door for more compliant replacements.

The request from Shedd, the former Tesla engineer, in particular, illustrates the variety of avenues and back doors that DOGE and Musk’s allies may have available to enter the government’s systems. According to the two federal workers we spoke with about Shedd’s efforts, such access typically is not granted to TTS leadership and requires a specific reason and the permission of each system’s owner. Shedd initially issued a blanket request, the sources told us, and is now attempting to bypass the individual system owners by seeking permission from other officials, circumventing standard security procedures. He also had not completed a background check, which is usually required for such access, at least as of when he first made the request, according to our sources. How much access Shedd has been granted remains uncertain.

This is the DOGE playbook: There are no norms to be respected, and everything is up for grabs. Once the damage is done, it will be difficult to remedy, especially if DOGE staffers can themselves grant or remove access to others at their discretion.

Musk and DOGE’s first month has been so chaotic, their incursions so haphazard, that assessing what has even happened is difficult. DOGE claims to be improving the government, but the agency workers we spoke with feel that they are being hacked instead. So it is worth stepping back to note the most basic fact: No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information. Even in one government office, full administrative access to all systems is the rarest privilege. In the aggregate, across the whole of the government, it would be unfathomable.