Here’s a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you’ve “invented” the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in.
Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.
USDS and 18F were genuine success stories. Obama-era programs that brought engineers from Silicon Valley into government to help all Americans by modernizing creaking federal systems. Here’s how USDS described itself two years in:
In the early days, we worried if more than ten people would apply to join the team. Two years later, folks from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the likes have joined to put their skills towards helping Veterans, students, small businesses, and all Americans.
That institutional knowledge, that decade of learning what works and what doesn’t, that careful balance between public service and private sector expertise? All gone. Torched by Musk as part of his faux “efficiency” crusade earlier this year.
And now they’re reinventing it. Badly. I used to joke that the Elon Musk Twitter era was all about throwing out all of Twitter’s carefully thought out ideas and then bringing them back in a dumber, more dangerous way. This seems like that, but in the federal government.
The United States Tech Force, announced Monday, is meant to source the artificial intelligence talent the government needs to win the global AI race and modernize the government, the administration says. The goal is to recruit an initial cohort of around 1,000 technologists who will be placed in agencies for two-year stints, potentially as soon as March.
“We need you,” said Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management. “The U.S. Tech Force offers the chance to build and lead projects of national importance, while creating powerful career opportunities in both public service and the private sector.”
Welcome to Temu USDS, everyone.
Same basic concept—rotate tech talent through government—but stripped of all the institutional knowledge about what actually works, run by political operatives instead of civil servants, and riddled with conflicts of interest that the original programs were specifically designed to avoid.
The especially galling part? Watching the same tech bros who helped destroy USDS and 18F now celebrate “Tech Force” as some brilliant innovation:
These are the people who either stayed silent or actively cheered when Musk gutted the actual working programs. Now they’re acting like this is some breakthrough moment of government-tech collaboration. Looking through the boosters, it looks like every partner at A16Z felt the need to support this. None of them seem to mention how this only came after the destruction of the programs that were doing such great work over the past decade (including during the first Trump administration).
Again, conceptually, there is merit to the idea of bringing in techies to help make government work better for the public. But it seems pretty obnoxious for these tech bros to jump into this without acknowledging (1) this existed and worked really well for over a decade until (2) they and their tech bro buddy Elon went in and destroyed it all. Also, given how the Trump admin has acted towards the public for the past 11 months, pretty rich to assume anything done by this new “Tech Force” will be in the interest of the public.
The one actual “innovation” in Tech Force creates a corruption vector that should alarm anyone who cares about government integrity: companies are guaranteeing participants can return to their old jobs after their tour of duty.
USDS never needed this because it wasn’t a problem—people could always go back to industry if they wanted. What this guarantee does is fundamentally change the incentive structure. Now you have engineers building government systems who know exactly where they’ll be working in two years, and whose interests they’ll be serving. They won’t divest from their stock. They won’t sever ties with their employer. They’ll just be on “leave” while accessing sensitive government data and making technology decisions that could directly benefit their future (and current) employer.
As the NextGov piece notes, this should set off every alarm:
“My first question with any programs like this are, ‘What are the rules that are in place to guard against conflicts of interest?’” said Rob Shriver, former acting OPM director and current managing director of Civil Service Strong at Democracy Forward.
This is especially worthy of attention, he said, given DOGE’s approach to data — “coming in and taking over agency systems and accessing data without going through the regular procedures” — which has been at the center of several lawsuits.
Scott Kupor, who is running this is a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, who was there for 16 years (basically since A16Z started) before taking this job. And he insists that there are no conflicts, so don’t worry about that at all:
The setup may vary by company, but the managing engineers from private companies participating in the program will “effectively take a leave of absence” to become full time government employees during the program, Kupor told reporters Monday. They won’t be required to divest from their stocks.
“We feel like we’ve run down all the various conflict issues and don’t believe that that’s actually going to be an impediment to getting people here,” said Kupor. “The huge benefit to the government will be getting people who are very skilled in the private sector at managing engineering teams.”
The idea is that the participants can return to their old jobs with new skills and expertise after working for the government, he said.
“We’ve run down all the various conflict issues”—except for the part where participants will keep their stock, maintain their guaranteed employment at private companies, and have access to sensitive government systems and data. But sure, no conflicts.
The value of tech expertise in government is real. That’s why USDS and 18F existed and succeeded for over a decade. What made those programs work was their careful construction to minimize conflicts while maximizing the transfer of knowledge and expertise.
This isn’t that. This is a hastily rebuilt version of a program they deliberately destroyed, now run by political appointees from the very industries that will benefit, with explicit mechanisms that invite corruption. They gutted the institutional knowledge, fired the people who knew how to do this right, and replaced it with a system where people from private companies get guaranteed access to government data and decision-making through employees who are explicitly planning to return to those same companies.
That doesn’t seem like innovation. It seems much more like regulatory capture with better branding and a cool “force” name.
First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his way, enriching his allies, and dismissing any consequences with a wave of his hand.
The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story:
The spokesperson, in response to written questions, confirmed DOGE still exists as a temporary organization within the U.S. DOGE Service, and that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS.
But, of course, most of this is just semantics, just as the “DOGE” name has always been semantics as well. The idea was, from the very beginning, a smash-and-grab job, in which Elon would get access to the fundamental (traditionally highly guarded) systems of the US government and wreak havoc, Twitter-style, in which anything he and his suck-up compatriots didn’t understand would be deemed “bad” and anything that helped enrich him and his friends would be deemed “good,” and any consequences (including destroying life-saving programs around the globe) would be dismissed with the wave of a hand, and no culpability.
“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.
“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
Wired’s report has details on a bunch of DOGE bros with little-to-no relevant experience who are continuing the DOGE grift while employed throughout the federal government, detailing the new (and constantly changing) set of job titles of a bunch of the DOGE crew, almost all of which they seem wholly unqualified for.
But the bigger story may be now that they’re scattered across the bureaucracy without Elon as their shield, some of these DOGE operatives are starting to realize they might actually face legal consequences for the very real and very serious damage they caused. A recent Politico report noted that the younger members of the crew are getting genuinely worried about how this ends:
The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.
As the sun fell on downtown Washington, the displaced dozen joined up with fellow DOGE staffers atop the nine-story GSA building, armed with beer, pretzels and La Croix, and prepared for something akin to a wake. Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.
Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering.Other DOGE leaders were less sanguine. “Guys, seriously,” one warned, “get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system.
Elon Musk, least of all. In recent interviews, he’s still rejecting the claims that the projects he gleefully cut resulted in any real world harm:
In an interview with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on hisWTF Ispodcast, Musk denied that DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts and its mandate totarget federal “waste”included “stopping essential payments to needy people” in Africa.
“Fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They’re not going to say, ‘Give us the money for fraud,’” Musk said. “They’re going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false.
“It’s going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn’t want to save the baby pandas? They’re adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing, it’s just corruption, essentially.
“And you’re like, ‘Well, can you send us a picture of the panda?’ They’re like, ‘No.’ OK. Well, how do we know it’s going to the pandas?”
This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.
Musk’s condescending little fable about demanding photos of pandas would be merely insufferable if he were actually talking about pandas. But he’s not. He’s talking about programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon.
What’s quite clear now is that DOGE did nothing to reduce government inefficiency. If anything, it created much greater inefficiency by forcing the federal government to try to reestablish essential programs (and rehire haphazardly fired experts) in a mad dash to keep certain aspects of the government from completely falling over. And that’s not to mention all the deaths. As Atul Gawande noted in the New Yorker:
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respectedtracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustainthe programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.
The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.
So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build. Those DOGE members nervously telling each other to “get your own lawyer”? They should be.
Elon Musk’s promises on government spending cuts have followed a predictable trajectory: slash $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then a mere $150 billion. Now we have the final accounting from the Congressional Budget Office: DOGE didn’t just fail to cut spending—it presided over spending increases that exceeded even pre-DOGE projections.
Elon Musk said he was going to cut spending by $2 trillion dollars, but instead spending is higher this year than we thought it would be before Trump took office. Truly incredible stuff.
The CBO’s fiscal year 2025 report shows that despite all the performative cruelty, mass firings, and destruction of essential programs, total federal spending (excluding interest) rose by $220 billion, or 4%, for the entire fiscal year. As budget expert Bobby Kogan notes in his analysis of the numbers, even accounting for some accounting adjustments related to student loans, noninterest spending still increased substantially.
This is the perfect capstone to what we’ve been documenting all along: DOGE was never about efficiency. It was always about ideological destruction masquerading as fiscal responsibility.
As the Trump administration started,Elon Muskclaimed his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, could achieve$2 trillion in savings—equal to more than a quarter of total spending in fiscal 2024.
Not even close. DOGE did claw back some grants and fire some probationary employees. And some savings will show up later as federal workers who accepted deferred resignation drop off government payrolls in fiscal 2026.
But thathasn’t changed the big picturemuch so far. Total spending excluding interest rose $220 billion, or 4%, for the entire fiscal year.
The numbers are even more damning when you dig deeper. The WSJ notes that the Trump administration recorded a $131 billion noncash spending reduction related to modifications in student-loan programs—essentially an accounting adjustment, not actual savings. Without this paper shuffle, noninterest spending would have risen by $351 billion for the entire year. DOGE was so ineffective at cutting real spending that they had to rely on accounting gimmicks to make their numbers look less catastrophic.
So much for revolutionary cost-cutting. The only categories where spending actually declined were the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (because fewer banks failed) and the Small Business Administration (because disaster-related loan costs from 2024 didn’t recur). Neither had anything to do with DOGE’s “efficiency” efforts.
The real story in these numbers is what any competent budget analyst could have predicted: the biggest drivers of spending—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—all increased by 8%. These programs grow because of aging demographics and rising healthcare costs, not because of bureaucratic inefficiency that can be solved by firing middle managers. Addressing these trends would require serious policy work around healthcare costs, immigration to support the tax base, and long-term fiscal planning. Instead, DOGE chose X-fueled tantrums about “government waste” while the actual budget drivers continued their inexorable climb.
The spending increases become even more damning when you remember what DOGE actually accomplished during its reign of chaos. As we documented in our previous coverage, DOGE managed to waste at least $21.7 billion in just six months while destroying life-saving programs based on conspiracy theories Musk found on social media. The agency eliminated USAID—which had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021—because Musk believed fringe accounts claiming it was funding Hamas and manufacturing COVID-19.
And then there’s the perfect metaphor for DOGE’s “efficiency”: the government is now scrambling to rehire many of the workers Musk fired in his cost-cutting blitz. The General Services Administration recently begged hundreds of federal employees to return after Musk’s cuts left the agency “broken and understaffed.” These workers had been getting paid during their forced seven-month vacation while taxpayers footed the bill for mounting costs from properties that couldn’t be properly managed without them.
The GSA rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies—the IRS, Labor Department, and National Park Service have all had to bring back employees who took DOGE’s buyout offers. When you’re rehiring at multiple major agencies simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning efficiency—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.
Of course, trying to bring all those people back while all non-essential government work is shut down and many government employees are simply not getting paid suggests that it’s going to be even more difficult (and, therefore, costly) to eventually restaff the jobs that DOGE screwed up in cutting.
This spectacular failure was entirely predictable to anyone who understood that DOGE was never a serious efficiency effort. It was performance art designed to satisfy the fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. Musk and his DOGE vandals assumed that complex government operations were just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted,” when in reality they were critical functions that keep society running.
The CBO numbers now provide the final proof: after all the chaos, cruelty, and conspiracy theories, DOGE didn’t save money—it cost money. Government spending went up, essential services were destroyed, and taxpayers are left cleaning up the mess.
Despite all of DOGE’s supposed efficiency measures, spending increased because the agency focused on ideological destruction rather than understanding what government actually does. You can’t achieve efficiency by firing the people who know how to do essential jobs and then having to hire them back at higher costs.
This is what happens when you put conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of complex systems they don’t understand. DOGE’s legacy isn’t fiscal responsibility—it’s expensive chaos that proves some people’s expertise actually matters, especially when Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.
DOGE’s singular achievement was proving that “move fast and break things” is catastrophically unsuited to governing a democracy. In Silicon Valley, you can break a social media feature and roll back the code. In government, you break USAID and people die. You fire essential workers and create expensive chaos that costs more to fix than the original “inefficiency” ever did.
The CBO numbers are the final punctuation mark on this expensive lesson in the difference between actual efficiency and performative destruction. We now have the receipts showing exactly how much Musk’s conspiracy-theory-driven approach cost taxpayers—and given the ongoing government shutdown and hiring crisis, we should expect that bill to keep growing.
I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don’t really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no one in charge is smart enough to understand what they do.
Remember when Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE vandals were going to revolutionize government by firing everyone and slashing everything? Yeah, about that. Turns out when you fire people who actually know how to do essential jobs, you eventually need to… hire them back. Who could have predicted this shocking turn of events? (Spoiler: literally everyone who was paying attention.)
The General Services Administration is now desperately begging hundreds of federal employees to come back after Musk’s cost-cutting blitz left the agency “broken and understaffed.” These are the same workers who were supposedly dead weight that needed to be eliminated to save taxpayer money. Funny how that worked out.
The General Services Administration has given the employees — who managed government workspaces — until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.
Those who accept must report for duty on October 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs — passed along to taxpayers — to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.
A seven-month paid vacation. Let’s pause to appreciate the stunning “efficiency” here. These workers got fired, kept getting paid, and now the government is begging them to come back because—surprise!—they actually knew what they were doing, were needed, and when they were suddenly cut loose it turned out to be an expensive mess that made it harder for the government to function. Meanwhile, taxpayers footed the bill for both their salaries and the mounting costs of properties that couldn’t be properly managed without them.
Of course, this was pretty much what a ton of actual experts warned would happen.
This is exactly what happens when a bunch of overconfident, under-informed Silicon Valley bros assume that complex government operations are just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted.” GSA wasn’t some bloated tech company with redundant product managers—it’s the agency that manages thousands of federal work spaces. You know, actual critical infrastructure that keeps the government functioning.
And, of course, GSA actually had a strong and incredibly effective team that worked on efficiency… and Musk fired them all.
“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”
Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a “triage mode” for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.
“Too far, too fast” is a charitable way to describe what amounts to institutional vandalism. This wasn’t thoughtful government reform—it was pure destruction for the sake of destroying anything a bunch of ignorant, incurious idiots didn’t understand, on the assumption that if they didn’t understand it, it couldn’t be that important.
They were wrong, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill.
Also, we’re not just talking about GSA here. There’s a pattern here of institutional destruction masquerading as reform. The rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies as the reality of Musk’s “efficiency” vision crashes into the actual requirements of running a government:
Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.
The scale of this backtracking is breathtaking. When you’re rehiring at the IRS, Labor Department, National Park Service, and GSA simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.
In the end, the massive job cuts that were supposed to save money have, instead, created expensive messes that cost way more than the original “inefficiencies” they were meant to fix:
The administration slashed GSA’s headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.
As a result of the internal turmoil,131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies tosteep fees because property owners have not been able to rent outthose spaces to other tenants.
This is what happens when you mistake activity for achievement. DOGE fired nearly everyone who managed the government’s portfolio of real estate and then acted shocked when nobody was left to manage the portfolios. Now taxpayers are on the hook for “steep fees” because properties couldn’t be properly vacated. The government is paying rent on spaces it’s not using because the people who knew how to handle lease transitions were… fired to save money.
And now they’re desperately trying to hire them back so they won’t even save money on the decrease in salaries.
Even DOGE’s own metrics show how spectacularly this has backfired:
DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.
From $460 million in supposed savings down to $140 million in actual savings—a 70% reduction in their own projections. This collapse in projected savings reveals the fundamental flaw in DOGE’s approach: they counted theoretical benefits from lease cancellations without accounting for the institutional knowledge required to execute those cancellations. The real number, factoring in transition costs, legal fees, and operational disruptions, is almost certainly negative. And that’s assuming you trust DOGE’s remaining figures. Which you probably shouldn’t.
This entire debacle perfectly illustrates the fundamental flaw in the “government is just a broken business” mentality. Government agencies exist to serve public functions that often don’t map neatly onto Silicon Valley efficiency models. When you fire the people who understand complex lease agreements, regulatory compliance, and interagency coordination, you don’t get innovation—you get extremely expensive chaos.
The particularly galling part is that these workers will now return to clean up the mess created by their own firing. They’ll spend months untangling lease complications, rebuilding institutional knowledge, and reestablishing relationships with contractors and other agencies. All of this remedial work will cost far more than their original salaries ever did.
The Government Accountability Office is now investigating this mess, which means taxpayers will also foot the bill for studying how badly DOGE screwed up:
The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA’s management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.
So we’re paying to study the costs of the effort that led to the cuts that didn’t save money but instead cost more money. It’s inefficiency all the way down.
This is what happens when you let tech bros cosplay as government reformers with no oversight or expertise. They mistake complexity for inefficiency, assume institutional knowledge is just bureaucratic dead weight, and believe that “disruption” is always improvement. The result is predictable: expensive chaos that requires the very expertise they dismissed to fix.
The federal employees now being begged to return have every right to negotiate better terms, demand back pay for the chaos they didn’t create, and insist on job security protections against future DOGE-style tantrums. They’re the ones who will clean up this mess, rebuild what was broken, and restore the basic functions that kept government working before Musk decided to reinvent the wheel as a square.
Rather than government efficiency we ended up with expensive performance art designed to satisfy the digitally-inspired fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. The only thing DOGE has efficiently accomplished is proving that some people’s expertise actually matters, even if—especially if—Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.
I am reminded of Rod Hilton’s viral Mastodon post from a few years back about Elon Musk:
If you can’t see that, it says:
He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
I get the feeling that a lot of government workers who previously thought he was a genius may also now choose to stay away from Musk’s cars and rockets. As they should.
This isn’t normal. Federal judges don’t usually air their grievances about the Supreme Court in open court. The fact that an entire appeals court panel—including respected conservative judges—turned their oral argument into what Politico called “a remarkable, 80-minute venting session” tells you everything about how broken the system has become.
The immediate catalyst was trying to figure out what to do with a case about DOGE’s access to Social Security data after the Supreme Court issued one of its trademark unexplained emergency orders. But the real issue was much bigger: how are lower courts supposed to function when the highest court in the land operates like it’s playing Calvinball?
“They’re leaving the circuit courts, the district courts out in limbo,” said Judge James Wynn… “We’re out here flailing. … I’m not criticizing the justices. They’re using a vehicle that’s there, but they are telling us nothing.They could easily just give us direction and we would follow it.”
Judge Wynn didn’t stop there:
“They cannot get amnesia in the future because they didn’t write an opinion on it. Write an opinion,” Wynn said. “We need to understand why you did it. We judges would just love to hear your reasoning as to why you rule that way. It makes our job easier. We will follow the law. We will follow the Supreme Court, but we’d like to know what it is we are following.”
I’ve been writing about the law for almost three decades. I’ve never seen anything like this. Ever. Not even in the same zip code as this. These are judges crying out for help under a completely lawless Supreme Court.
And, no, this wasn’t just liberal judges complaining. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III—a Reagan appointee and one of the most respected conservative jurists in the country—was right there with them:
“The Supreme Court’s action must mean something,” said Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee. “It doesn’t do these things just for the kicks of it.”
Even Wilkinson can’t figure out what the hell the Supreme Court is doing. When you’ve lost Harvie Wilkinson—a judge so conservative and institutionally minded that he’s basically judicial royalty—you’ve completely broken the system.
The specific case that triggered this judicial revolt involves the Supreme Court’s typical shadow docket bullshit. In June, the Court overruled the Fourth Circuit’s decision and lifted an injunction against DOGE’s use of Social Security data. But they did so in the most bizarre and troubling way. After sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit for more review, it said that even if the Fourth Circuit rules that DOGE is breaking the law, the stay will remain in place.
By an apparent 6-3 vote, the justices went further, saying that no matter what the appeals court decided, the injunction would remain on hold until the case returned to the Supreme Court. Yet, the high court’s majority offered no substantive rationale for the lower court to parse.
So the Supreme Court basically said: “We’re overturning you, and also whatever you decide doesn’t matter anyway, but we’re not going to tell you why.” This left the entire Fourth Circuit panel wondering what the fuck they’re even supposed to do.
That left many of the 15 4th Circuit judges on hand for Thursday’s unusual en banc arguments puzzling at their role. One even suggested the appeals court should simply issue a one-line opinion saying the injunction is lifted and kick the case back to the Supreme Court to resolve.
Some judges thought they should just give up entirely and punt the case back to SCOTUS since SCOTUS has already said whatever they decide here doesn’t actually matter. Others insisted they had a constitutional duty to actually do their jobs:
“It sounds like some of my colleagues think that there’s no work to be done, that we’re done because the Supreme Court has told us what the answer is,” said Judge Albert Diaz, an Obama appointee.
Judge Robert King said punting on the case would be a mistake.
“We each have a commission and we have a robe and we have an oath to abide by,” said King, a Clinton appointee.
This perfectly captures the impossible position the Supreme Court has created. Lower court judges literally don’t know if they’re supposed to do their jobs or just rubber-stamp whatever vibes they think they’re getting from the shadow docket.
The whole mess stems from a series of recent Supreme Court shadow docket rulings (without much explanation) basically telling lower courts they have to follow SCOTUS shadow docket rulings (also without much explanation) as binding precedent. But as we’ve written about extensively, these aren’t reasoned legal decisions—they’re often unexplained orders issued with minimal briefing, no oral arguments, and little to no explanation of any reasoning.
This has created a situation where experienced federal judges—people who’ve spent decades interpreting legal precedent (often longer than the Justices themselves)—literally can’t figure out what the Supreme Court wants them to do.
What we’re witnessing is the breakdown of the federal judiciary as a functioning institution. When Reagan and Obama appointees are united in open revolt, and Harvie Wilkinson can’t figure out what the Supreme Court wants, the system has collapsed.
The three liberal Justices have been warning about this in dissent after dissent, while the conservative majority just keeps issuing more unexplained orders and then getting pissy when lower courts can’t read their minds. This isn’t jurisprudence. It’s government by judicial decree, where constitutional law operates on vibes and the only consistent principle is “give Trump whatever he wants.”
When federal judges with decades of experience are reduced to public pleading for basic guidance during oral arguments, we’ve crossed into judicial authoritarianism. The Supreme Court has effectively told the entire federal judiciary: “Follow our orders, but we won’t explain what they mean, and if you guess wrong, we’ll scold you for defying us.”
That’s not how precedent works. That’s not how courts work. That’s not the rule of law. It’s just nine people in robes demanding deference to their unexplained whims.
On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”
Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.
DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”
The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.
DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”
Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.
Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.
It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.
DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”
The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.
The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”
In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”
For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.
The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.
They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.
They did none of these things.
Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.
Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.
Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.
By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.
Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely madefront-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.
Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.
To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.
Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)
At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”
Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.
In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.
After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.
In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.
But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)
Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.
In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.
Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)
Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”
Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”
DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.
Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.
In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.
Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”
Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.
Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedlysaid that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)
Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”
Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.
Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.
Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.
Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.
Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)
Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.
“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.
Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”
Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.
During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)
Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”
But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)
This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.
But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.
“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”
“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)
One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.
But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”
Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.
Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.
In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.
DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.
When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.
Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)
Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.
Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.
As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.
“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”
“How dare you,” Miller said.
Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”
But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.
Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.
Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.
On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”
Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.
It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.
“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)
As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”
Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.
“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”
Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.
Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.
And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.
Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.
Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”
Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”
Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”
As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”
The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”
Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”
Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.
Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.
Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.
In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”
Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.
The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”
The lawsuit also points out that Trump’s FCC and agency boss Brendan Carr have “acted favorably on several Starlink initiatives,” and recently opened a dodgy “investigation” into Dish Network, which the suit alleges is flimsy cover to force Dish to sell its valuable spectrum holdings to Elon Musk and Starlink.
The lawsuit also claims that the Trump FCC violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by wrongfully withholding records on DOGE’s activities at the FCC.
The Judge managing the lawsuit apparently doesn’t think much of Trump and Brendan Carr’s FCC responses to the inquiry so far. The plaintiffs in the case filed a motion for preliminary injunction last week (hat tip, Ars Technica) and received a quick ruling from US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia.
While Jackson said the plaintiffs failed to meet the legal requirements for an injunction, she did take time to point out that Trump’s FCC is stonewalling on providing documentation:
“On July 2, 2025, the Court ordered that defendant “must file a dispositive motion or, in the alternative, a report setting forth the schedule for the completion of its production of documents to plaintiff, on or before July 23, 2025.” However, defendant’s July 23, 2025 status report provided no timeline, and it was vague and uninformative. Further, the anticipated “initial production” defendant referred to [in] that filing, amounted to only 35 pages.”
DOGE has also provided flimsy “innovation efficiency” cover in the press for the brutal dismantling of both corporate oversight and the social safety net, in addition to just generally being a wasteful, costly mess all by itself. What’s left of federal consumer protection and corporate oversight really is being summarily executed by radical assholes, and the impact will be massive and generational. Yet, with scattered exception, most U.S. journalists, politicians, and policy folks don’t seem particularly interested.
It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.
Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.
But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”
Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.
It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.
In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.
And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.
This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.
Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.
Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.
Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.
About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.
The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.
Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”
While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.
“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.
He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.
A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.
Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.
In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.
At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.
For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”
With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.
Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.
“The Taliban Gets DOGED”
At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”
Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.
Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”
“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”
“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.
He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”
In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”
In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.
While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.
Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.
Timeline of Events
Mar. 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.
Mar. 313:58pm EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.
Mar. 317:17pm EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.
Mar. 31 to Apr. 17:29 p.m. ESTto 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.
Apr. 17:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.
Around Apr. 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.
May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.
USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.
He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.
As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.
Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.
After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.
Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)
The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.
“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”
It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.
When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”
Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.
Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.
But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.
Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.
Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.
While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.
In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.
When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.
Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.
Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.
When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.
Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.
But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.
It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.
But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.
When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.
Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.
The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.
Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.
They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.
Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.
“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”
Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.
During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.
A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.
Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.
Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”
As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.
Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”
USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.
Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”
At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.
In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”
George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”
Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.
In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?
“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”
Remember back in February when the DOJ told a court that, despite multiple public statements from both Elon Musk and Donald Trump to the contrary, Elon Musk was not associated one bit with DOGE and therefore should not be subject to litigation regarding DOGE’s wildly illegal actions? And remember how lots of people just kinda pretended this was fine and normal?
Well, in the ruling that Cathy Gellis just wrote about, the judge clearly recognizes the reality that Elon Musk absolutely was DOGE:
Musk, assisted by his DOGE subordinates, “continued to exercise control over USAID systems . . . to systematically block access to all systems by USAID personnel.”
Later, the judge makes it clear that the plaintiffs alleged—plausibly, despite the DOJ’s spin—that Musk ran DOGE, by his own public admissions. The judge is responding to the DOJ’s claim that Musk isn’t subject to the Appointments Clause because he had no real authority in his role. As the judge notes, nobody who wasn’t born yesterday would believe this:
This argument, however, fails to account for Plaintiffs’ allegations which strongly support the inference that Musk directed the actions to shut down USAID without authorization from any USAID official, including the closure of USAID headquarters and the removal of the USAID website, between January 31, 2025 and February 2, 2025. Consistent with its analysis in Does 1, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 668-69, such an inference is supported by the allegations in the Second Amended Complaint that Musk took a leading role in DOGE’s efforts to take physical control of USAID headquarters, including its secured spaces, and that Musk publicly took credit for the dismantling of USAID during this time period in multiple posts on X, including the February 2 and 3 posts in which he stated that “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” that “we’re in the process of . . . shutting down USAID,” that “USAID is a criminal organization,” and that it was “[t]ime for it to die.” SAC ¶ 87-88.Collectively, these allegations support the inference that, as the de facto administrator of DOGE at the time, Musk directed these actions.
Obviously this is motion-to-dismiss posture, not a factual finding. But when a federal judge is drawing reasonable inferences from well-pleaded allegations and concluding Musk was the “de facto administrator” of DOGE, the DOJ’s “he was just an advisor with no authority” line becomes harder to sell with each filing.
Cathy had mentioned this ruling on Bluesky as she was working on her article, and apparently that alerted lawyer Kel McClanahan of a judge officially recognizing Elon as DOGE administrator.
OK full disclosure I only found this because @cathygellis.bsky.social was complaining about OCR and I was like wtf opinion is she talking about
And that matters because Kel is representing multiple clients who are suing Musk and DOGE in cases where the DOJ continues to deny Musk’s role. So Kel took this information he learned from Cathy and made sure the judges in his cases learned about it as well.
Plaintiffs respectfully draw the Court’s attention to today’s opinion in Does v. Musk, No. 25-462 (D. Md.), in which Judge Chuang finds not once but twice that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged that Elon Musk was in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE,” however that term was defined
It has been more than six months since Trump took office and kicked off his Musk-led rampage through the federal government. And more than six months that everyone has been turning to the courts to stop the DOGE destruction. These litigation efforts have led to some wins, although too many of them have been short-lived as either SCOTUS or even the motions panels at the appellate courts have all too often undone the protective injunctions that litigants finally managed to extract—albeit increasingly, as district courts’ hesitancy to restrain federal executive power has given way to the growing recognition of how much of that supposed executive power has been exercised illegitimately and harmfully.
Such a realization is at the heart of this decision discussed here, from a case that has been discussed before, Does 1-26 v. Musk, where an initial win of an injunction against Musk and DOGE’s ruination of the USAID agency was soon evaporated by the Fourth Circuit. The big reason why the Fourth Circuit overturned the injunction was due to an issue that has kept coming up in these challenges: ratification. Because while it’s bad enough for Musk and DOGE to tear through the government, despite no lawful authority to do anything, there is a separate problem when those with lawful authority follow along after them to do the same things. Even in this case, one of the several challenging the illicit destruction of USAID as a functioning agency despite all statutory language prohibiting anyone but Congress from doing anything to interfere with its function, we’ve seen the effects of this sort of ratification, as Musk and DOGE’s super-duper illegal RIF notices to staff were later reissued only super illegally by non-DOGE officials with actual authority when it comes to running the agency. Because even these officials’ authority is still limited; they cannot do something that the law does not allow (in this case: winding down the agency that they are supposed to run). So following the loss at the Fourth Circuit the plaintiffs amended their lawsuit to name the non-DOGE officials too in order to give the court jurisdiction over their participation in the overall wrongdoing.
And in this new decision the court gave the case the green light to continue, except without Trump himself as a named defendant.
Here, Plaintiffs’ request for declaratory relief against President Trump involves matters that are not as clearly ministerial. See id.; New Mexico, 2025 WL 1502747, at *19 (dismissing the President as a defendant from a case seeking declaratory relief where the duties implicated by the relief were “highly discretionary”). Moreover, courts considering whether to issue injunctive or declaratory relief against a President have recognized that the constitutional concerns associated with doing so “can be successfully bypassed” where the plaintiff’s injury “can be rectified by injunctive relief against” subordinate Executive Branch officials. See Swan v. Clinton, 100 F.3d 973, 976 & n.1, 978-79 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (recognizing that “similar considerations” apply to requests to obtain injunctive or declaratory relief against a President); NTEU, 492 F.2d at 606 (noting that “if it were possible” for the plaintiff to “enforce its rights by naming a defendant additional to or in substitution of the President,” the court “would exercise its discretion not to answer the question of whether the President is subject to mandamus by a federal court”). Where, as here, Plaintiffs’ requests for relief will proceed as to other Executive Branch officials with authority over the relevant issues in this case, the Court will dismiss the claims against President Trump. [p.47-48]
But everyone else named—Musk, Amy Gleason, Marco Rubio, and more—are all still on the hook, with the court rejecting all the arguments raised by the government for why the case should have been dismissed entirely. The most salient relate to standing, statutory preclusion, failure to state a claim, and claim splitting.
On standing, the court found that the plaintiffs had adequately pled that they had in fact been injured [p.32-34], that this injury was “traceable” to the defendants [p.34-37], and that it was redressable by holding the remaining defendants liable.
Here, the requested relief includes an injunction setting aside prior actions and barring further actions by Defendants to “modify, reorganize, or eliminate USAID,” as well as an injunction setting aside actions taken at USAID by Musk and DOGE personnel and barring them from “performing their significant and wide-ranging duties at USAID.” SAC ¶ 141. Even without a request for specific relief relating to the placements on administrative leave and the RIFs, these forms of relief could facilitate redress of Plaintiffs’ injuries because an order halting the elimination of USAID as an agency pursuant to either the Separation of Powers claim or the Appointments Clause claim would certainly “remov[e]” a significant “obstacle” to Plaintiffs’ regaining some form of employment at USAID or other relief. Sierra Club, 899 F.3d at 285. In addition, as to the Appointments Clause claim, where Plaintiffs have alleged that Musk directed the shutdown of USAID, an order undoing his actions and barring additional actions by Musk and DOGE at USAID would similarly contribute to providing Plaintiffs with relief by removing a force that has driven forward the process that has caused or will imminently cause Plaintiffs’ loss of employment. Accordingly, accepting the allegations as true and construing them in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs have satisfied all three requirements to establish standing at this stage of the case. [p.37-38]
On “failure to state a claim,” the court found the Appointments Clause and Separation of Powers claims that every DOGE action ends up implicating one way or another had been adequately pled in a way that the court could still provide relief, here through a declaratory judgment or another injunction. With respect to the Appointments Clause claim, the court made the point in particular that just because so many of the problematic actions had already happened did not make the sought after relief moot (“[W]here that episode occurred only a few months ago and there is no reason to conclude that DOGE has ceased all activity at USAID, it is premature to conclude that there is no basis. or need for injunctive or declaratory relief relating to this claim.” [p.42]). And as for Separation of Powers, that the agency has effectively already been shut down, despite Congress never authorizing such a fate, suggests such a claim remained viable.
The Second Amended Complaint contains allegations that substantially replicate the facts adduced in Does I to support the conclusion that “USAID has been effectively eliminated,” id. at 671; compare SAC TT 65, 74-75, 83-88,93-99, 102-17, with Does I, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 669-71, but also includes additional, more concrete allegations demonstrating that Defendants are acting to “eliminate[]” “substantially all non-statutory positions at USAID,” “decommission[]” USAID assets, and “wind-down” the agency’s independent operations, as described in the Lewin Memorandum and the Congressional Notification Letter, SAC ¶ 120. Accordingly, where the Court previously concluded that Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their Separation of Powers claim in Does I, see 771 F. Supp. 3d at 678, and where the Second Amended Complaint contains even more allegations about Defendants’ course of conduct to eliminate USAID outright than were available at that time, the Court finds that Plaintiffs have stated a plausible Separation of Powers claim. See Does 1, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 678. Cf. Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union v. Vought, 774 F. Supp. 3d 1, 57-58 (D.D.C. 2025) (finding that the Executive Branch’s actions to shut down of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau likely violated the Separation of Powers), stay granted in part, No. 25-5901, 2025 WL 1721068, at *1 (D.C. Cir. Apr. 11, 2025). [p.43-44]
Perhaps more interestingly the court also rejected the “statutory preclusion” arguments, or, put another way, the arguments that the plaintiffs’ claims are just employment disputes that have to be brought before specialized agencies tasked with adjudicating employment disputes for federal workers. Because the plaintiffs here were largely USAID staff being wrongfully terminated, the government argued that, per statute, courts could not hear the complaints.
We saw the government make similar arguments before, especially in the case brought by the union of foreign service officers in the D.C. district court, AFSA v. Trump. This case has unfortunately now been dismissed for lack of standing and is thus on appeal, but earlier this year the court there refused to enjoin the agency firings. But that was then, and this is now, found this court in this case. It observed that the harm being considered by that earlier court—loss of employment—was just financial in its nature, and thus less “irreparable,” since “the agency [was] still standing.” But since that ruling, things have changed, and the potential harm to the plaintiffs here is much more weighty. Because, even if before it could be presumed that illegally-terminated employees might still have a job to go back to at the agency if their claims were redressed, such is not the case now when there is about to be no more agency at all.
Defendants’ citation of American Foreign Service Association v. Trump (“AFSA”), 768 F. Supp. 3d 6 (D.D.C. 2025), does not alter the Court’s conclusion. In AFSA, in denying a motion for a preliminary injunction, the court found that it was likely that the CSRA precluded it from exercising jurisdiction over a Separation of Powers challenge to the dismantling of USAID brought by two unions representing USAID employees. Id. at 11, 14-15, 21. In so ruling, however, the court noted that even though “in the long run,” the unions’ harms could flow from “the alleged unlawful dismantling of USAID,” at that time, “the agency [was] still standing, and so” the unions’ alleged harms based on which they sought injunctive relief related only to the changes in their members’ employment conditions at that early stage of the case, such as placement on administrative leave and requirements to return to the United States on an expedited basis, which were “largely financial” in nature. Id. at 20. Since that time, however, through the Lewin Memorandum and the Congressional Notification Letter, Defendants have confirmed their plan imminently to abolish USAID as an independent agency. Thus, the present case differs in that it relates not to employees’ specific employment conditions, as was the case at the early stage of AFSA, but to the abolition of an entire federal agency. [p.19-20]
Ultimately the court here found that the plaintiffs would be in an impossible position if the district courts couldn’t hear their claims and they had to appeal to these other agencies instead, en masse, because they were set up to handle only routine matters of federal employment, like with respect to issues with seniority. They were not set up to address the wholesale firing of an entire agency’s worth of personnel!
Nevertheless, regardless of whether the claims are subject to the CSRA, the Court finds that the CSRA does not provide for meaningful judicial review of Plaintiffs’ claims. Specifically, as alleged in the Second Amended Complaint, Plaintiffs’ claims, and their injuries, flow not from any specific employment action, but from the decision to dismantle and abolish USAID entirely. Channeling the claims of the Civil Service Employee Plaintiffs to the MSPB would foreclose meaningful judicial review because even if they were able to prevail in the administrative proceedings as to any particular employment action, such as by securing reinstatement to a USAID position, that relief would be meaningless because if the dismantling and abolition of USAID remain unaddressed, the Civil Service Employee Plaintiffs would have no workplace to which to return. [p.15]
And adjudicating the Constitutional issues that these terminations implicated was not part of their expertise.
Plaintiffs’ claims fall outside the MSPB’s expertise. The MSPB’s expertise largely consists of addressing adverse employment actions and prohibited personnel practices that violate the merit system principles set forth in 5 U.S.C. § 2301(b). See 5 U.S.C. §§ 7513(d), 1214(b)(4)(A); N4/J, 139 F.4th at 313. As discussed above, however, Plaintiffs’ claims do not directly or indirectly involve the application of such principles and instead assert structural constitutional challenges grounded in the principle of the Sepration of Powers. The Supreme Court has recognized in the context of other administrative review schemes that “agency adjudications are generally ill suited to address structural constitutional challenges.” Axon, 143 S. Ct. at 905 (quoting Carr v. Saul, 141 S. Ct. 1352, 1360 (2021)). In Axon, where the plaintiffs brought Separation of Powers challenges to actions by certain federal agencies’ administrative law judges (“ALJs”) because (1) the ALJs were unconstitutionally insulated from the president’s supervision; and (2) combining prosecutorial and adjudicatory functions in a single agency was unconstitutional, the Court found that the claims were outside of the relevant agencies’ expertise because they raised questions of constitutional law that were “detached from `considerations of agency policy’ and “distant” from the agency’s “competence and expertise,” as the agency “knows . . . nothing special about the separation of powers.” Axon, 143 S. Ct. at 897, 905 (quoting Free Enter. Fund, 561 U.S. at 491). [p.18-19]
Furthermore, the employment review agencies themselves have also been gutted by DOGE firings, and it did not sit well with the court that the same illicit power that wrongfully fired federal workers could now effectively render them powerless to seek redress of it.
As to the first step of the test, in NAIJ, the Fourth Circuit held that although the Supreme Court “has recognized that the CSRA, when functioning as Congress intended, was designed to strip district courts of jurisdiction,” that conclusion may no longer be true because recent events, including President Trump’s removal of the Special Counsel and of two members of the MSPB such that it lacks a quorum, “raise serious questions as to whether the CSRA’s adjudicatory scheme continues to function as intended.” NAIJ, 139 F.4th at 304-05. Based on this conclusion, the Fourth Circuit remanded that case to the district court “to conduct a factual inquiry whether the CSRA continues to provide a functional adjudicatory scheme,” and, if warranted, “a new examination of Congressional intent” as to the CSRA in light of these recent events. Id. at 308. Where the Fourth Circuit’s decision in NAIJ was released after briefing on the Motion concluded, and where the Court finds, as discussed below, that the Civil Service Employee Plaintiffs’ claims do not meet the second step of the Thunder Basin test, the Court declines to make a determination on whether the CSRA meets the first step of the Thunder Basin test. See Free Enter. Fund, 561 U.S. at 489 (noting that the Supreme Court presumes “that Congress does not intend to limit jurisdiction” if the three Thunder Basin factors at step two of the inquiry weigh in favor of that result). [p.13]
While it is a big deal for this court to recognize that the statutory scheme is inapt for the types of harms at issue here, it is not the first to do so, and it cites another case that did.
In a recent opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the MSPB could not provide meaningful judicial review of statutory and Separation of Powers challenges to large-scale RIFs across multiple federal agencies because even if an individual plaintiff could pursue an individual claim before the MSPB and appeal to the Federal Circuit, such a procedure would not provide meaningful judicial review because the alleged injury was not from the particular employment action, but “from subjection to [unlawful executive] authority” in violation of the Constitution. Am. Fed ‘n of Gov’t Emps. v. Trump (“AFGE”), 139 F.4th 1020, 15 Case 8:25-cv-00462-TDC Document 150 Filed 08/13/25 Page 16 of 48 .1028, 1032 (9th Cir. 2025) (quoting Axon, 143 S. Ct. at 906), stay granted on other grounds, Trump v. Am. Fed’n of Gov’t Emps., 145 S. Ct. 2635, 2635 (2025). Here, Plaintiffs notably seek no damages and do not even specifically request injunctive relief to allow them to retain or recover their positions. Even to the extent that Plaintiffs’ general request that the Court “set aside any actions taken by Defendants” to eliminate USAID could be construed as including such relief, SAC ¶ 141a, as in AFGE, “such a path to the federal courts would be meaningless where . . . entire offices and functions are being eliminated from federal agencies,’ such that a successful plaintiff “would return to an empty agency with no infrastructure to support a resumption of their work.” AFGE, 139 F.4th at 1032 (quoting Am. Fed’n of Gov’t Emps. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-03698-SI, 2025 WL 1482511, at *14 (N.D. Cal. May 22, 2025)); see Elev8 Balt., Inc. v. Corp. for Nat’l & Cmty. Serv., No. MJM-25-1458, 2025 WL 1865971, at *1, *17 (D. Md. July 7, 2025) (finding that the CSRA could not provide a union representing federal employees meaningful judicial review of its Separation of Powers challenges to the dismantling of AmeriCorps); cf. New York v. Kennedy, No. 25-cv-196-MRD-PAS, 2025 WL 1803260, at *1, *9 (D.R.I. July 1, 2025) (finding that the CSRA could not provide meaningful judicial review of states’ constitutional and statutory challenges to the large-scale terminations of employees at and reorganization of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, because there was “little to no value” in “requiring employees to bring individual claims about their employment status to MSPB” because even “successful Plaintiffs ‘would return to an empty agency’ (quoting AFGE, 139 F.4th at 1032)). [p.15-16]
Meanwhile, the existence of this other case in D.C. that had been trying to get USAID employees un-fired gets to the other interesting defense raised by the government in support of its motion to dismiss the case: claim-splitting. In this argument the government was charging that because there are multiple cases addressing very similar facts, it looks like plaintiffs may be getting multiple bites at the apple to try to get the judicial result they want, which is not something individual plaintiffs are allowed to do. But the court here noted that the plaintiffs aren’t actually the same in both cases. While there may be overlap in the classes the plaintiffs represent, the actual litigants animating and directing these cases are different and not in privity with each other.
Here, Defendants have not provided evidence that Plaintiffs are in privity with the organizations asserting the allegedly related claims in these other lawsuits. Indeed, they have not even demonstrated that Plaintiffs are all members of one of those organizations. The Court therefore declines to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint on this basis. Cf. Cooper v. Harris, 581 .U.S. 285, 297-98 (2017) (declining to dismiss claims brought by individual plaintiffs as barred by res judicata where the party asserting that defense “never satisfied the District Court that” the individual plaintiffs were members of an organization that had brought similar claims in a separate lawsuit). [p.39]
And such is the consequence an abusive government is likely to suffer, that it might find itself having to defend itself in multiple courts on similar questions, because had it taken aim at fewer people then there would be fewer people to take issue with it. And in no case should the government be able to benefit here from having attacked the rights of an agency’s entire workforce where, because it had victimized so many, it would now be impossible for any to seek redress.
In fact, there have had to be multiple cases, especially with respect to the illegal destruction of USAID, which suffered especially from being the agency Musk and DOGE “put through the woodchipper” first, as he unlawfully and unconstitutionally canceled contracts, laid off staff, and took away agency assets. Which meant that all the legal challenges to stop Musk and DOGE with respect to USAID also happened first, hitting the courts as matters of first impression before they had a chance to get their jurisprudential arms around the full extent of executive power abuse they were dealing with here, and before litigants figured out how to bring their challenges most effectively.
Because if everyone had to do it over again, knowing what we know now, presumably USAID would not now be standing on the precipice of being all but lost as an agency come September 2, when the last wave of RIFs kicks in to layoff the last of its now skeleton workforce from this once robust and valuable agency Congress established, and never closed.
