DOGE Timeline

Representatives of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fanned out across several agencies Wednesday, sending representatives to the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and meeting with the Labor Department, seeking access to sensitive data. The moves came on the heels of the DOGE team gaining access to sensitive health payment systems at the Department of Health and Human Services.

As federal workers braced for possible layoffs after a Thursday deadline that has led to at least 40,000 employees taking a buyout, DOGE staffers met with agencies facing sweeping cuts in a project that has gutted whole programs and given Musk’s team broad access to private data. In a little more than two weeks, the Trump megadonor — acting as a “special government employee” while still running the companies that have made him the richest man in the world — has probed all over for cuts and begun enacting some, helping to effectively shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and suggesting that other departments could be next.

The speed and scope of DOGE’s work have stunned many in government and raised widespread legal concerns. On Wednesday, several labor unions sought a restraining order to keep Musk’s team away from the Labor Department, arguing that DOGE’s work was illegal and has “already been catastrophic.” DOGE staffers met virtually with Labor staff Wednesday afternoon, after a protest drew hundreds to the front door of the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

But critics have struggled to keep up with DOGE’s overhaul, and the Republicans who control Congress have largely applauded its work and declined to seek more input. Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee blocked Democrats’ bid to subpoena Musk, with the panel’s GOP leaders dismissing Democrats’ protests that an unelected billionaire should not be able to dismantle the bureaucracy without lawmakers’ consent.

“It’s a naked power grab consistent with what Trump’s advisers have persuaded him to do, which is to flood the zone with as much unconstitutional activity as possible, with the hope that they get away with some or all of it,” said Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer during President Donald Trump’s first term but is now a critic.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Musk’s work, telling reporters that Trump “campaigned across this country with Elon Musk, vowing that Elon was going to head up the Department of Government Efficiency, and the two of them — with a great team around them — were going to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it’s accountable to American taxpayers. That’s all that is happening here.”

A White House official added that DOGE leaders are overhauling the government “in full compliance with federal law,” with appropriate security clearances and as “employees of the relevant agencies.”

In recent days, officials affiliated with DOGE have visited the offices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), according to five people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions. DOGE officials have also sought access to payment and contracting systems across the Department of Health and Human Services that control hundreds of billions of dollars in annual payments to health-care providers, and they appear to have gained access to at least some of those systems, the people said.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that DOGE aides had been granted access to the CMS grant-management system.

Appearing to confirm his interest in the agencies, Musk posted on X on Wednesday afternoon that Medicare “is where the big money fraud is happening,” without offering evidence or specifics.

“CMS has two senior agency veterans — one focused on policy and one focused on operations — who are leading the collaboration with DOGE,” Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, wrote in an email. “We are taking a thoughtful approach to see where there may be opportunities for more effective and efficient use of resources in line with meeting the goals of President Trump.”

A spokesperson for DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Sidebar panel discusses Elon Musk's new role as a “special government employee.” (Video: HyoJung Kim/The Washington Post) On Wednesday, Musk’s team also reached out to engage with the Labor Department. Senior department leaders told staffers who handle sensitive data that they would begin working with DOGE in the coming weeks, beginning with an in-office meeting Wednesday, according to an agency staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. DOGE assignments would override the team’s normal duties, the staffer said.

But senior leadership moved Wednesday’s meeting from in-person to virtual after labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, announced a protest of DOGE outside the Labor Department.

The agency manages huge amounts of sensitive data related to unemployment claims, health insurance plans, disability insurance, workplace health and safety investigations, wage theft, and child labor. It was unclear Wednesday which parts of the Labor Department and its data DOGE officials intended to access.

Hundreds of union activists gathered outside the department’s headquarters Wednesday afternoon holding signs that said “Hands Off Workers Data” and chanting “Elon Musk has got to go.”

“This squarely affects workers,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, told The Washington Post at the rally. “We want to make sure that we have transparency, that we know what access data they’re accessing.”

David Casserly, a Labor Department employee who protested outside the agency’s offices Wednesday, said he opposed “people who have no experience with labor, and who don’t know what we do, coming in and making random cuts.”

Musk’s team played a key role in the buyouts offered across the federal workforce last week as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically shrink the government. The offer expires Thursday and would allow workers to resign with pay through Sept. 30. Most of the federal government’s 2.3 million civilian employees are eligible, according to the White House, and a General Services Administration official said this week that layoffs could follow. As of Wednesday evening, 40,000 federal employees had agreed to take the buyout, according to a person familiar with the figures who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The contact with the health-care agencies comes as emissaries of DOGE fan out across the federal government in what they say is a pursuit of waste and fraud in payments.

The health department spends nearly $2 trillion per year, mostly on health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, making it a top target for lawmakers and watchdogs who say the programs are rife with abuse. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, his former partner in the DOGE effort, have publicly mused about cracking down on HHS spending as part of a broader goal to cut at least $1 trillion in federal spending.

Bipartisan efforts to restrain Medicare spending in the past have frequently faced political backlash, with health-care providers and patient groups warning about the effect on delivering care and other services.

Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted a DOGE associate access to a critical payments system responsible for disbursing trillions of dollars annually. Bessent later said that access had been granted on a “read only” basis and that the DOGE associate had been made a Treasury official. Musk affiliates have also been placed in leading roles at the Office of Personnel Management and other key agencies.

These efforts have caused alarm in some parts of the civil service, with workers fearing that Musk’s team is going around traditional safeguards. Musk and his allies, including Trump, have defended the push as necessary to root out waste.

“Nonpartisan experts have long believed that more than 10 percent of Medicare and Medicaid spending is improper. It’s essential to identify and root out these improper payments in order to direct more funding to patient care for seniors and vulnerable populations,” said Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes free markets.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog, has concluded that Medicare and Medicaid represent more than 40 percent of improper payments across the federal government. “Both Medicare and Medicaid are susceptible to payment errors — over $100 billion worth in 2023,” the GAO wrote in April 2024.

DOGE officials have asked for access to federal systems such as the Unified Financial Management System and the Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System, said the people with knowledge of their requests.

The HIGLAS system, which is tightly controlled, contains sensitive financial information about all of the hospitals, physicians and other organizations that have financial relationships with programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act — a vast database that touches nearly every corner of American health care.

Current and former federal officials said personnel who access those systems are required to undergo specialized training to comply with privacy protections under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. It was not immediately clear if DOGE officials have undergone that training.

DOGE has also requested that the CDC prov

Agents of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees — including Treasury and State Department officials in sensitive security positions — as part of a broader effort to take control over the government’s main personnel agency, according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of the developments.

The records maintained by the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, amount to a repository of sensitive information about employees of most federal agencies — including addresses, demographic profiles, salary details and disciplinary histories. The moves at the OPM by members of Musk’s pseudo-governmental DOGE have coincided with similar efforts to gain access to sensitive systems at other agencies, including a Treasury Department system responsible for processing trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments — a development reported last week by The Washington Post.

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.”