CIVHUB

The recent installation of Elon Musk ally Thomas Shedd atop the federal IT structure has thrown an agency in charge of servicing much of the US government’s technical infrastructure into disarray.

Over the last few days, workers at the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), which is housed within the General Services Administration (GSA), have been summoned into what one source called “sneak attack” meetings to discuss their code and projects with total strangers—some quite young—who lacked official government email addresses and have been reticent to identify themselves. TTS workers have also received confusing transition guidance and a sudden DC office visit from Musk.

It was announced last week that Shedd, who previously worked as a software engineer for eight years at Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, would be the new TTS director. In emails to TTS staff, Shedd reinforced the Trump administration’s commitment to cutting costs and maximizing efficiency—something Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been charged with carrying out.

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“I’ve spent my entire career in Silicon Valley,” Shedd wrote in an introductory email to staff last Thursday and obtained by WIRED. “If we work together and execute well we will be able to navigate the policies, leverage our technical expertise and be a critical part of accelerating technology adoption across agencies to enable great gains in efficiency.”

TTS helps develop the platforms and tools that underpin many government services, including analytics tools and API plugins that agencies can use to deploy tech faster. This means that the group has access to troves of government data and systems across agencies. That access is useful for standardizing the many, not always interoperable, systems that the federal government uses, but could also provide invaluable information to a private company or be weaponized against government employees and citizens.

Early Wednesday morning, rumors began to spread at TTS that employees would be receiving surprise one-on-one meeting notifications from management. During these brief meetings, employees would, according to a staff email that Shedd sent later on Tuesday, be asked to identify their biggest “wins” and the most significant “blockers” preventing them from working as efficiently as possible. The email linked to a Google Form questionnaire for employees to fill out ahead of their scheduled meetings. The invites included people without official GSA email accounts who were using Gmail addresses as well as official government accounts, multiple sources told WIRED.

“These should be items that you completed,” a screenshot of the form obtained by WIRED said. “It is OK to have a mix of big projects and small wins (examples: fixed a critical bug, shipped XYZ feature, saved this amount on a renegotiated contract, ect [sic] … If you are an engineer or designer please include a link to a PR [pull request] or a screenshot of one of your wins from the past 3 months.”

The email is reminiscent of one that Musk sent early in his Twitter days, demanding that employees email a one-page description of what they had accomplished the previous month and how it differed from their goals.

Rather than convening with Shedd in these meetings, TTS employees were instead surprised to be met with people they had never seen or worked with before.

“It was a very confusing call because I expected to be meeting you, and I was instead met by two people reluctant to identify themselves,” one TTS employee told Shedd in an open Slack channel, one of several reviewed by WIRED. “They had not seen the information I submitted in my form, so I was left trying to explain things without the visuals/links I had submitted,” one wrote.

“Also had the same exact experience,” another employee added. “The individual I had met with had no idea about the google form I submitted and when I did reference it, I was met with avoidance.”

In a Slack message to TTS staff on Thursday morning viewed by WIRED, Shedd apologized for the vague and sudden meeting invites, and for including unnamed individuals in the meetings who joined with Gmail addresses.

“They are each in the onboarding process of obtaining a GSA laptop and PIV card. I take full responsibility for the actions of each of them in the calls. I’ve asked them to start the calls with their first name and confirming that they are an advisor to me,” Shedd said in a screenshot of the Slack message viewed by WIRED.

Shedd told employees that the people on the calls were “vetted by me, and invited into the call.” He said they were physically present with him at the GSA headquarters, and that he had “badged them all into the building.” This implies that those joining the calls did not currently have official government IDs issued to agency staff.

At least two of these individuals appeared to be “college students with disturbingly high A-suite clearance,” one TTS source told WIRED. (A-suite clearances tie employees to the GSA administrator’s office.)

One person says they were brought into a review with Edward Coristine, a recent high school graduate who spent several months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, whom WIRED has previously identified as a person working at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and reporting directly to its new chief of staff, the former xAI employee Amanda Scales. He has not responded to requests for comment from WIRED, and OPM has declined to comment.

“We do not have any additional personnel announcements at this time.” a GSA spokesperson told WIRED on Thursday.

It’s typical for TTS workers to work in tandem with other agencies across government, with many of their projects containing data external to GSA and subject to sensitivity agreements. Being required to share specific technical achievements, though, spooked some employees who feared they could breach these agreements.

“The team is correct in feeling nervous sharing details about other agencies in these calls and should continue to follow the normal guidance which is to not share sensitive information,” Shedd wrote in the GSA Slack on Thursday. “The point of these calls is to talk through interesting example problems/wins and dig into how that win was realized. A chance for you to brag about how you solved a problem.”

This week, it appears that TTS has become the primary target of these meetings, but members of the US Digital Services—which a Trump executive order has rebranded as Musk’s DOGE—also met with management to go over their recent work last week. The DOGE meetings were conducted similarly in structure to the TTS ones, according to The Washington Post.

Like many other agencies, GSA has been making changes to DEI initiatives that have put workers on edge. On January 23, TTS deputy director Mukunda Penugonde announced that as part of the GSA’s new initiative to curtail DEIA programs, the agency would be shutting down its “Diversity Guild meeting series” and the “#g-diversity Slack channel effective today,” in an email reviewed by WIRED.

Musk was seen at the GSA office near the White House on Thursday, but it’s unclear what he was doing there. Shedd was scheduled to lead a meeting with around 40 TTS program supervisors Thursday afternoon. On Wednesday, WIRED reported that Musk has been telling his friends that he’s been sleeping at the DOGE office in DC.

Of all parts of the government, TTS, perhaps even more so than DOGE, is well positioned to get inside agencies’ technology and data, including government spending data, explaining why it’s such a focus for the new administration.

“TTS represents the consolidation of 20-plus years of tech and data expertise, brought together by the hard work of hundreds (if not thousands) of civil servants,” Noah Kunin, a cofounder of 18F, a team of designers and engineers within the GSA that help government agencies build and deploy new tech products, and a former infrastructure director at GSA, tells WIRED. “They have the products, platforms, and people to do this work right, within the confines of current law, and fast.”