A group of 21 civil service employees, many of whom previously held senior roles at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, resigned en masse Tuesday from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after they refused to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the staffers wrote in a resignation letter posted on the “We the Builders” website. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the staffers wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
The group of engineers, data scientists, product managers and designers warned that many of those recruited by Musk, the world’s richest man, to chainsaw the federal government under President Donald Trump, were political ideologues with a limited grasp of technical matters. The mass exit comes amid court challenges to stop and reverse Musk’s campaign to eliminate thousands of government jobs.
The workers said they were subjected to interviews on Jan. 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, by individuals with White House visitor badges who questioned them about “political loyalty.”
“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter Tuesday.
After the letter was first reported by the Associated Press, Musk posted this on social media platform X: “More fake news from Associated Propaganda. These were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office. They would have been fired had they not resigned.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, disregarded the departures. “Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years,” Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers.”
The 21 staffers had worked for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), established during President Barack Obama’s administration following the bungled rollout of Healthcare.gov. The technology-focused unit was rebranded as DOGE, an advisory board led by Musk that has fired thousands of federal workers in a vigorous push to slash government waste.
On Feb. 14, about 40 USDS staffers were fired. In Tuesday’s joint letter, the resigning staffers cautioned that dismissal “endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe.”
