What happened as DOGE tore through the offices of federal workers
In August, months after Elon Musk left the federal government, the director of the Office of Personnel Management offered the first hard estimate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s impact on the civil service. The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees than it had at the start of the year, he told reporters. Most resignations were attributable to the incentives DOGE had offered the federal workforce to resign their positions. The total figure amounted to one in eight workers.
Well, almost. In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies, the ramifications of building a master database to track and surveil immigrants are just beginning to be felt, and its cadre of Musk protégés and tech entrepreneurs remain embedded in agencies throughout the executive branch. The possibilities this opens up—of private takeovers of government operations, of the government embracing Silicon Valley’s ethos of moving fast and breaking things—remain open.
WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers across dozens of agencies to gather the most comprehensive picture yet of how the American government got to this point, and where it may go from here. Many sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation. They told WIRED not just what has been going on inside the federal government at a time of unprecedented change—but what it’s been like to experience those changes firsthand.
The following is the story, in their words, of what happened when the world’s most powerful man unleashed the world’s richest one on the world’s most complex institution.
“I kept comparing it to a natural disaster,” one worker at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told WIRED. “But it wasn’t natural. Just a stampede of wide-eyed, confused government employees moving files around and looking over their shoulders because they think maybe Elon was creeping behind them with a chain saw.” [Continue reading…]