Twenty-one federal employees who previously worked for the United States Digital Service, which President Donald Trump renamed via executive order to the United States DOGE Service, released a letter on Tuesday resigning in protest, claiming they would not use their technical skills to “dismantle critical public services.”
The 21 federal employees were at USDS prior to its transition to DOGE, and were not employees hired by tech billionaire Elon Musk as part of his efforts to slash the federal government.
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” said the letter from the 21 employees, who began working with Musk team over the last 10 days.
“We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions,” the letter said.
USDS was launched in 2014 to improve the federal government’s technology systems, before Trump renamed it last month to reflect the name of the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk, responding to the Associated Press’ story on the resignations, said in a social media post, “These were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office.”
In this photo illustration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) logo is seen on a smartphone and on its X website in the background.
Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images via Shutterstock
“They would have been fired had they not resigned,” Musk posted to his social media platform X.
The employees who resigned included the department’s head of IT, and multiple engineers and product managers, according to the letter.
In the letter, the employees claim that the day after Trump’s inauguration, they were “subjected to 15-minute interviews by individuals wearing White House visitor badges” who refused to give their names. On Feb 14, “one-third of our USDS colleagues were indiscriminately terminated,” the letter said.
According to the letter, the employees had begun getting integrated into DOGE’s work on Feb. 16.
“DOGE’s actions — firing technical experts, mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems — contradict their stated mission of ‘modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,'” the letter stated.