Brief. Mysterious. ‘anxiety Provoking.’ Inside Doge’s Crusade To Overhaul The Gsa

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency agents have swarmed the government looking to size up worker productivity — and federal staffers who have chatted with the tech billionaire’s lieutenants fear jobs that aren’t compatible with a Silicon Valley work style are on the line.

Three General Services Administration employees — all of whom spoke to POLITICO anonymously out of fears of retribution — described their and their subordinates' recent interviews with Musk’s DOGE agents as potentially career-ending, with federal employees feeling like every word they’re saying could be grounds for future dismissal. The behind-the-scenes agency handles the federal government’s real estate, software and logistics — so Musk and his team’s efforts to trim GSA could have a domino effect across the government.

"The interviews are anxiety provoking," said a GSA supervisor whose employees were recently interviewed by a DOGE worker. The tension swells the moment a worker receives a calendar invite from a Gmail account, they said, "frequently with almost no notice and often scheduled over existing client meetings."

Another GSA employee, a project manager, described his DOGE interview as a whirlwind.

The DOGE agent identified himself as an "adviser" to Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who became the director of the GSA’s technology servicing sub-agency called the Technology Transformation Services in January. The project manager said the conversation with the DOGE employee was a brief, 15-minute interview with little attention paid to any experience on moving complete projects through the federal government.

"Most people are trying to hype their technical skills,” the project manager said. "They don't think DOGE people respect the softer 'moving complex projects through government bureaucracy' types of skills."

The project manager said they fear that, based on the brief interaction, their job is on the line. That’s because project managers in the federal government act as middlemen “to get buy-in from senior leadership about tech things they might know nothing about,” they said, while those in tech can directly handle software and hardware projects.

Doing away with traditional government project managers could remove a layer of bureaucracy Musk said stifled innovation.

The manager added that they “can’t be certain” they said the right things to save their job.

The flurry of interviews that rocked GSA and other federal agencies in the past weeks underscore Musk’s infusion of the intense Silicon Valley culture that built his tech empire into the federal government, the GSA staffers said. Either you were a loyalist fully committed to the new mission, or you were seen as expendable.

The series of internal interviews is a part of President Donald Trump and Musk's crusade to modernize the federal government and cut the $6.1 trillion federal budget by a third. The Trump administration and GSA, under newly appointed acting administrator and software entrepreneur Stephen Ehikian, have made their vision for the agency clear: GSA should slash its budget in half by cleaving contracts and personnel, according to notifications staff received earlier this month.

According to the three GSA staffers, DOGE enforcers did not specify what would happen next. Two other staffers said they had not been interviewed, but DOGE lieutenants are still conducting formal one-on-one discussions.

White House DOGE adviser Katie Miller did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the interview process, nor did a spokesperson for GSA.

GSA is a particularly ripe target for budget cuts because most of its funds come from product and servicing contracts, not Congress. This means DOGE can make cuts while trying to skirt legal questions about whether it can actually slash funds already approved by Congress and former President Joe Biden.

GSA provides other federal agencies with real estate management, policy standardization and technical services. A diminished GSA could strain the federal government by offloading these tasks onto inexperienced workers in other hollowed-out agencies, staffers said.

“It is a strange place to start when you say you care about government technology modernizing,” said a GSA data scientist who was interviewed by DOGE, though they conceded there was some redundancy in the agency.

The meetings, which some said took place the same day they were scheduled, were framed as a way to assess a team's strengths and weaknesses, the staffers said. “But the tenor of it clearly also suggests it has to do with ranking people and figuring out who to cut, especially since it started with probationers,” the supervisor said.

The DOGE crew’s questions led GSA staffers to believe the group was looking to cull employees who lacked technical skills or added bureaucratic layers to government operations, which some techies like Musk have sought to eliminate for rapid, unregulated innovation.

Those staffers who spoke with POLITICO believe DOGE may keep engineers and others who ship code, including web designers. Most other jobs, they continued, are probably on the chopping block.

GSA and DOGE’s vision for the agency now includes artificial intelligence projects that hint at “a Silicon Valley mental model of ‘pour all the data into a [language learning model] and then replace all the jobs with AI,” said the supervisor, who was familiar with the deliberations. GSA and DOGE are developing a chatbot called GSAi to increase worker productivity and have proposed other AI tools to scrub contracts for redundancies and streamline processes, two staffers said.

If Musk's history in Silicon Valley is of any indication, the federal government under his watch will likely follow through on these cuts. After he purchased Twitter in 2022, Musk sent employees an email titled "Fork in the Road" and warned they should brace for lengthy work hours or resign. Federal staffers received an email with the same subject line from the Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 28, in which the agency offered them “buyouts” with pay and benefits through Sept. 30.

Musk has since laid off about 80 percent of Twitter's original workforce for his rebranded site X. Trump and others in his circle have since weighed possible mass layoffs if too few employees quit, officials told CNN. And GSA officials corroborated similar messaging to staffers, according to internal memos obtained by POLITICO.

But the Silicon Valley hack-and-slash playbook isn’t in line with an organization focused on providing a public service, the data scientist said.

That’s because haphazard cuts that cause service outages — even relatively brief ones — could be disastrous for the millions of Americans who use GSA services without even knowing it. The agency operates Login.gov, the central login system for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other public assistance lifelines. “We’re not talking about saving money here. We’re talking about saving people’s lives and providing services people cannot go without,” the data scientist said.

Sweeping cuts are “not something you can do when you run a system people access every single day,” they continued. “You need up-time of 99.999 percent.”