“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.
