DOGE gets a new leader amid wave of staff resignations

The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to have a new chief after the White House appointed a little-known official, Amy Gleason, as its “acting administrator.”

Such administration appointments don’t normally attract a lot of attention, but these are not normal times and, as commentators keep reminding everyone, DOGE is not a normal department.

Even the news of Gleason’s appointment was made in unorthodox style through comments to media outlets by an anonymous White House official, rather than through an official press announcement.

At the same time, it now has fewer staff — although these are possibly not the roles DOGE booster Elon Musk was hoping to eliminate when he emailed government employees last week a now notorious ultimatum requiring them to list their weekly achievements by reply or face being fired.

Federal workers at the US Digital Service, now renamed DOGE, have the IT and technical skills needed to fulfil DOGE’s remit of cutting government overheads and driving out waste while slimming down its supposedly bloated headcount.

Not all of them, though, are happy with the department’s abrupt change of direction. On Tuesday, 21 of them, including engineers, data scientists and IT staff, resigned en masse, claiming in a letter passed to media outlets including Associated Press that they were being asked by DOGE to use their technical skills to “dismantle critical public services.“

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments,” the letter reportedly said.

Motivation in question

Many of the remaining staff working for DOGE lacked the skills to do the job and were motivated primarily by ideological zeal, the letter said. DOGE was mishandling sensitive data, introducing security risks and breaking critical systems, they added. The last straw: being asked about their political loyalty during interviews.

These are not the first resignations and might not be the last from the technical teams Musk will be depending on to fulfil his, at times, increasingly chaotic remit. Last week Steven Reilly, lead engineer for the notify.gov government messaging service, resigned over an alleged request by a Musk appointee for access to 20 government systems containing sensitive data.

Everyone had previously assumed DOGE was being run and directed by Elon Musk even though for two weeks nobody within the administration was able to confirm this. Bizarrely, that included White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt when asked direct questions on the subject during press briefings.

Last week, 14 US states forced the administration’s hand by naming Musk as DOGE head as part of a suit seeking to curb the department’s power. This was denied by White House Director of the Office of Administration, Joshua Fisher in a counter-filing; Musk wasn’t running or directing DOGE because nobody was, he claimed.

That now looks like a delaying tactic. DOGE might not have official status, but at least it now has a chief in Gleason, even if her appointment appears to have been made in the strangest way possible by a White House source who would prefer to remain nameless.

Acting administrator Gleason’s LinkedIn profile includes a three-year stint with the first Trump Administration as a “digital services expert,” after a career largely focused on healthcare.

In theory, her appointment makes her accountable for DOGE’s actions and missteps, which matters at a time when its actions are generating significant opposition and scrutiny.

But the question is whether she — or anyone — can ever be said to be running DOGE when everyone pays more attention to the statements of the operation’s puppet master, Elon Musk.

What’s not in doubt is that with DOGE rapidly turning into a rallying point for opponents of the Administration’s agenda, Gleason has her work cut out for her.

Until relatively recently in history, quickly gaining access to tens of millions of files on citizens would have been impossible. They were held in paper files requiring months of work by huge teams to trawl through. In the last two decades, this has changed. Now, in the digital era, those same files can be stored on a large hard drive. Analyzing the data can be achieved within days or hours.  

That’s why access to these files is controlled by layers of rules and laws covering data security and privacy, and who is trustworthy enough to be granted access. This is the battle line now cited in multiple lawsuits: is DOGE’s unorthodox modus operandi and data mining agenda remotely compatible with these rules?