“By the way, it’s not doje. It’s doggie. What the hell? This isn’t France.”

— Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) on how to pronounce DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency.

As a Northern Nevadan, I don’t always agree with my congressman. 

I do, however, agree with Amodei on the proper pronunciation of DOGE, even if “dojes” were Italian, not French — neither Italy, France nor The Venetian Resort are located in the 2nd Congressional District so his point remains valid. 

Additionally, as a fellow self-described “process guy,” I also agree with many of the comments he made to the Reno Gazette-Journal surrounding the increasingly slapdash activities of the agency formerly known as the United States Digital Service.

Starting at the top (of the organizational chart), the agency lacked an administrator until roughly a week ago — though you might be forgiven for agreeing with Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford that Elon Musk, not Amy Gleason (who, incidentally, was vacationing in Mexico when her promotion was announced), is the one actually in charge.

Seeing as more than a month passed between President Donald Trump’s renaming of the U.S. Digital Service into the “United States DOGE Service” and the announcement that Gleason is serving as the agency’s acting administrator, you might be wondering who ran the agency in the meantime. If so, add yourself to the list of federal judges and other observers who have been asking this administration that very same question — a question which lawyers for the administration still won’t answer. 

Trump’s executive order renaming the agency, after all, required those running other executive branch agencies to build “DOGE Teams,” whose members would be selected “in consultation with the USDS Administrator,” within 30 days — so who was consulted when agencies built their teams? 

A subsequent executive order freezing the hiring of additional federal personnel also requires the administrator of DOGE to be consulted on plans to reduce the size of the federal workforce. So who’s being consulted?

The answer certainly seems obvious enough. Musk represented DOGE in Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, not Gleason. Also, Trump himself said he put Musk in charge of the agency three days after the administration’s lawyers told federal courts that Musk isn’t a part of the federal bureaucracy at all.

Musk has also repeatedly announced broad changes in federal policy well beyond the purview of “modernizing federal technology” established in Trump’s executive order on his privately owned social media platform — not to be confused with the Federal Register, which is where the federal government usually announces changes in policies and regulations. One notable example includes Musk demanding that all federal employees respond to weekly emails with a list of accomplishments. Emails sent in response will then apparently be fed into a large language model, which will do … something with them.

Now, how did someone who may or may not be in charge of a federal agency tasked solely with modernizing federal technology gain the power to control and dictate personnel policy to the entire executive branch? That’s a great question. I appreciate everybody making it this far into the op-ed and God Bless America, thank you.

Moving on from the top of DOGE’s organizational chart, there’s the small matter of identifying who works for DOGE or its teams. 

The U.S. Digital Service, its organizational predecessor, had 230 employees before it was rebranded by Trump’s executive order. Since then, dozens of staffers were dismissed and 21 more resigned following a series of reinterviews.

So who’s working for the “DOGE teams” that were created after Trump’s executive order? Are they former U.S. Digital Service staffers, new employees, contractors — or what?

Under most circumstances, the identities of government employees are publicly available — the names, titles and payroll information of Nevada’s public employees, for example, can be found on the state’s Open Finance Portal. Despite DOGE being a public agency, however, attempts to identify who’s now working in or with DOGE and in what capacity have been met with accusations that journalists are “doxxing,” or publishing private information about someone with malicious intent. 

As a reminder, records created by the government  — including information pertaining to who’s employed by the government — are public information, not private.

Even so, ProPublica and The New York Times, among others, have been doing their best to identify who’s doing what in relation to the agency. As a result of that work, we now know that many of DOGE’s newest additions are or were previously employed by Musk’s several companies. This coterie of former SpaceX, Tesla and Boring Company employees have been deployed to several federal agencies to do — well, nobody’s entirely sure what, but much of it hasn’t been good.

When I say it hasn’t been good, I’m not necessarily making a normative or moral judgment. I mean much of DOGE’s work thus far has been alarmingly incompetent.

Take, for example, DOGE’s new website at doge.gov. Initially, it only showed what was likely an AI-generated logo of a cartoon dog surrounded by erratically placed text and stars. The cartoon dog logo was then removed the following day and replaced with a statement that, “The people voted for major reform.” 

A few weeks later, DOGE’s new website finally started to publish actual information about the agency’s activities. Unfortunately, the new team at DOGE forgot to take some basic security precautions — the site’s content was hosted on a database that could be edited by anyone, and quickly was. Though that was later fixed, it was an embarrassing misstep for an agency that not only maintained a secure and functional website in its previous incarnation, it even published the code used to maintain the website for everyone to review.

DOGE’s work for various federal agencies hasn’t been much better.

When a 25-year-old member of a DOGE team was deployed to the Treasury Department, the Treasury Department responded by granting the young man administrative access — including the ability to overwrite existing code and data — over the federal government’s bill payment systems. That quickly led to several lawsuits and a recent judicial order prohibiting DOGE employees from accessing Treasury systems.

Then there’s DOGE’s work for the Internal Revenue Service, where attempts to access taxpayer records — including private bank records — quickly set off alarms. Though limits to DOGE’s access were later agreed to by the two agencies, the agency is still trying to push the IRS into sharing taxpayer data with other federal agencies. Sharing taxpayer data with any agency for reasons unrelated to administering taxes is currently illegal.

DOGE’s work for the Social Security Administration, meanwhile, revealed that Social Security payments were being delivered to millions of 150-year-olds — except that wasn’t true. Though the Social Security database does indeed contain millions of likely dead individuals — the SSA’s inspector general criticized the agency for this in 2023 — 98 percent of those in the database who are aged 100 or older don’t receive any benefits. Additionally, the Social Security Administration automatically stops payments to anyone over the age of 115.

Meanwhile, at the Department of Education, DOGE staff were quickly given administrator-level access to the department’s email system, which they used to gain access to the national student loan database — which stores personally identifiable information about student loan recipients — and feed data from it into AI software. Based on a cursory analysis of the data, DOGE then cut $900 million from the department’s budget before a court order halted further access to the department’s data.

Elsewhere, one DOGE team member requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems, which can then be used to grant and revoke access to those systems to other people. At the secretary of state’s office, according to a widely shared opinion column published by The Washington Post, a pair of DOGE staffers with online ties to white supremacists may have manually overridden aid payments authorized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Details on DOGE, as Amodei noted, are remarkably difficult to come by. This country now has a federal agency run by someone, but no one knows who, with unclear levels of authority over other federal agencies, that’s staffed by people nobody in the administration will willingly identify — and it’s firing Nevadans, including those responsible for fighting wildfires, left and right.

Wow. So efficient. Much transparent. 

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].