More than 20 civil service employees resigned on Tuesday from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services”.
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.
The former government employees said that they had been visited in the office by individuals wearing White House visitor’s passes, who interrogated employees about their political loyalty, work experience as well as their colleagues in the federal workforce. The letter also denounced the widespread worker layoffs that Doge has put into effect.
The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.
When news of the letter was first reported, Musk called the article “more fake news” in a post on X, though his tweets appeared to also confirm the resignations.
“These were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office,” Musk wrote on his X platform. “They would have been fired had they not resigned.”
Doge employee Katie Miller seemed to ridicule the staffers who resigned, saying: “These were full remote workers who hung Trans flags from their workplaces,” in a separate post on X.
On Tuesday, it was reported that Amy Gleason was identified as the acting administrator of Doge.
The staffers who resigned worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, an office established during Barack Obama’s administration after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat’s signature healthcare law.
Meanwhile, New York’s Democratic governor wants to hire federal workers fired by Doge. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday welcomed recently laid-off federal workers to apply for state jobs using an online portal.
“The federal government might say: ‘You’re fired,’ but here in New York, we say: ‘You’re hired.’ In fact, we love federal workers,” Hochul said in a videotaped statement.
