Elon Musk’s allies are turning a once-obscure federal IT unit into the linchpin of their sweeping campaign to tear down the federal bureaucracy, sparking fears of improper overreach and chaos among tech employees in the government.
During a tense meeting Monday, employees of the Technology Transformation Services section of the General Services Administration questioned Musk ally and Tesla alum Thomas Shedd about the agency’s future, after he and a cohort of unidentified 20-somethings spent the preceding days peppering staff with questions about their accomplishments and reviews of their work. Shedd, who was named the director of the unit last month, told the workers that the administration viewed them as “Swiss army knives” who can roll out services across federal agencies.
“You guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists,” said Shedd, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post. “The way the administration sees you is you’re kind of the gold standard of how to go in and get work done at these agencies, how to understand the technical problems that they have.”
In the background of those reassurances, however, Musk’s deputies have been quietly assessing the competency and loyalties of the existing staff to determine who to retain. The GSA, Shedd and Katie Miller, a representative for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Shedd’s comments underscore how Musk and a band of allies are harnessing tech units and other agencies that handle daily federal operations to amass sweeping control of the executive branch. Musk’s group has officially taken over the White House office formerly known as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed on Trump’s first day in office the U.S. DOGE Service. His allies are running the GSA - which manages real estate, procurement and IT - and the Office of Personnel Management, which handles HR.
With control of logistics, they’re taking extraordinary measures to slash at all parts of the government - pushing mass resignations, accessing a Treasury Department payment system, obtaining federal student loan data and challenging the very existence of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The TTS is just one prong of an apparent strategy to command the technical guts of the federal government, which undergird everything from the log-in pages for government applications to the Social Security Administration website. President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to put loyalists in charge of tech government-wide: On Tuesday, OPM in a memo ordered federal agencies to reclassify chief information officers as political positions to be chosen by the president.
Until recently, TTS’s mandate had been to make government platforms intuitive and accessible for users. The unit has employees embedded throughout agencies and influences how technology is used throughout the government, making it a powerful lever to advance Musk’s moonshot goal of slashing federal spending by $1 trillion.
The federal government has long struggled with outdated technology, which has led to critical government websites crashing and glitching. The office that DOGE took over in the White House launched in 2014 after the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, when website crashes prevented people from signing up for new online health insurance marketplaces. The small unit has made significant gains over the past decade, but federal workers continue to struggle with outdated equipment, slow internet connections and challenges with websites.
The TTS unit includes 18F, a team that helps other federal agencies build and buy digital services. On Monday, Musk posted on X that the unit had been “deleted,” and its social media account disappeared from the social network, which Musk owns. Employees within the GSA said they had not received internal communication about what Musk’s tweet meant, and that the unit still exists.
Musk’s team appears to be approaching its work as if the government were one of his companies, with longtime corporate lieutenants and the same drive to cut costs deeper and deeper - even if, as he said in 2023 in the wake of layoffs and steep spending cuts at X, “unfortunately there are going to be some babies thrown out with the bathwater.”
Wired previously reported on some aspects of the chaos among government tech employees.
[Congressional Republicans quiet as Trump and Musk brazenly challenge their authority]
At the Monday meeting, the plans for TTS’s role in the DOGE agenda came into focus. Shedd floated creating a “centralized place” to put government contracts so that they could be analyzed using artificial intelligence. He also proposed making coding agents - AI tools that automate computer programming tasks - available to federal agencies. He said the GSA should become a model for how agencies across the government use artificial intelligence.
Shedd also warned TTS workers that their team wouldn’t be immune from staff reductions even as demand for their tech services was set to “skyrocket.” He emphasized that the administration would be moving quickly to make drastic cuts by the end of the fiscal year.
“This is not a situation where it’s, take six months to understand the nuances of every single department and every single project, which is what I personally would prefer to do,” he said Monday, according to the recording. “This is a case of we’re in extreme bankruptcy mode as GSA and as a larger federal government. And so the pressure to make immediate changes is immense.”
When employees pushed back on Shedd’s bankruptcy characterization, Shedd said the GSA was on track to lose $200 million in fiscal year 2025. It’s not clear how Shedd had arrived at that figure or how a federal agency funded by appropriations of taxpayer dollars could be operating at a loss. In business, that would typically mean a company is spending more money than it makes.
“If this was a private company, our shareholders would be saying, ‘How do we cut $20 million from the budget this week?’ Or they’re going to pull out,” he said.
DOGE on Tuesday announced on X that it had slashed consulting contracts in the GSA, including a $23 million work order for “digital modernization Program Management Office support.” Such contracts typically support efforts to improve technology within agencies so government services are easier to access and more secure.
As Musk set his sights on different agencies, civic tech workers are beginning to fight back, launching a labor organizing effort that amassed dozens of staffers rapidly, including from TTS.
“We are a group of federal public service technologists advocating for our values, showcasing the impact of our work, and exercising our rights,” the group, Civic Tech Strong, declared on a website that launched this week.
Shedd has been joined in government by others from Musk’s businesses. Amanda Scales, the chief of staff at OPM, worked for his artificial intelligence start-up xAI. Three of her six direct reports in the government previously worked at SpaceX, his rocket company.
Musk’s operation has sought to conduct its work under the cloak of secrecy; associates have declined to identify themselves in interviews with staff of the former U.S. Digital Service and TTS, according to multiple federal workers with knowledge of the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal proceedings. In many instances, Musk-affiliated advisers are withholding their last names and using anonymous personal email addresses so employees cannot identify them.
Confronted about their anonymity in an all-hands meeting on Monday, Shedd said, “We’re afraid of those folks’ names getting out and their personal lives being disrupted, which is exactly what happened last week, which is really unfortunate for them.”
Staffers found a dark irony in that answer, given how their own lives have been upended over the past two weeks. Some of their colleagues were targeted online over the weekend, as Musk heaped scorn on the work of civil servants on X while going through different agencies’ operations. Shedd promised in the Monday meeting to take steps to address the security of employees, but the workers have received far less support this week than they did during a similar incident in 2023, two people said. (The U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, threatened prosecutions this week for anyone who harasses or tries to interfere with DOGE employees, in a letter to Musk that he posted on X.)
One federal employee said the DOGE security worries are “laughable given the DOGE concerns are about an unaccountable bureaucracy,” adding that it flies in the face of the basic notion of “‘what it means to work in the government.’ … our names are public. Our salaries are public. Everything we type in slack or email is public record.”
Throughout the past two weeks, Shedd and the unidentified DOGE associates have been using questions similar to those Musk asks at Tesla and his other businesses when interviewing candidates. Musk has said he asks workers: “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.”
As young and largely inexperienced software engineers interview workers within the GSA about retaining their jobs, they ask workers to point to a recent “technical win” and explain how it came together.
“Advice: problem keep high level, how you leveraged specific tech/methods/ect to solve it, that is where detail is great,” Shedd wrote in a Slack message viewed by The Post. He explained that employees could share how they used a programming trick to speed up a database query. “What data is in that [database] is not relevant and doesn’t need to be shared.”
Shedd has also conducted surprise reviews of the code underpinning applications built by GSA staff, said one GSA employee. He was joined on a video call by two “extremely young men” who were identified only as advisers. They silently observed the entire call and did not speak. Shedd on Slack told employees the advisers were in “the onboarding process of obtaining a GSA laptop and PIV card,” a government-issued card that allows workers to access federal buildings and computer systems.
By successfully answering interview questions, filling out detailed questionnaires and submitting screenshots of their code, staffers are hoping to convince Musk’s surrogates that they are fit to continue working in the positions some have already held for years.
Shedd responded to employees’ concerns about the advisers presence in a Slack message on Thursday. He explained the conversations about “problems/wins” were “a chance for you to brag about how you solved a problem.”
He acknowledged that many of the employees were embedded in agencies throughout the federal government, and he wrote, “there is no expectation that individuals would break sensitivity agreements.”
Supervisors at the GSA have also been asked to compile lists of their direct reports along with a recent work accomplishment for each - “big impact items,” as they are referred to internally - seemingly as a way to demonstrate their engineering chops, but also to thin out existing staff.
Top staff at the agency were informed Thursday of a goal to slash the agency’s budget by 50 percent compared with the 2024 fiscal year, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Musk’s team is making use of “sleep pods” that have been delivered to federal offices to work around-the-clock, which Musk indicated was part of a strategy of essentially outmaneuvering the civil service.
“DOGE is working 120 hour a week,” Musk said in an X post at 3:21 a.m. Sunday. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”
At the meeting with Shedd, TTS employees asked him whether it was legal for them to work more than 40 hours a week. He referred them to human resources.
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Emily Davies and Alice Crites contributed to this report.