Department of Government Efficiency is Taking Steps to Avoid Transparency
Emails leaked to 404 Media indicate that the new DOGE department, formerly the United States Digital Service (USDS), has ordered employees to stop using Slack while government lawyers attempt to transition the agency. DOGE was created by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office that moved the department from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to the Executive Office of the President (EOP).
Good morning, everyone! As a reminder, please refrain from using Slack at the moment while our various general counsels figure out the best way to handle the records migration to our new EOP [Executive Office of the President] component.
I spoke to the DOGE team about Slack. Because of the USDS split from OMB, OMB is asking us to stop generating new slack messages starting now.
We expect this to be a temporary pause, and we expect to continue having access to historical Slack material. We may have intermittent access as we go through this system transition so continue to use good data hygiene and backup any critical material.
Daily Beast explains that the DOGE department moving to the EOP instead of the OMB means they are now subject to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) instead of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Presidential Records Act allows presidents to restrict public access to their records. Under the act, presidential records can only be obtained via FOIA requests at least five years after the end of the administration.
All of this comes in stark opposition to previous statements from Elon Musk, the head of DOGE, who made the Twitter Files public for the world and also posted on Twitter X that all information in the government should be public unless there is a genuine risk to the country such as instructions to make nuclear bomb. He goes on to say that “all government data should be default public for maximum transparency. I think that the strong bias with respect to government information should be to make it available to the public. Let’s be as transparent as possible. Fully transparent.”
Daily Beast further reported that the DOGE team are mainly young Musk fanatics with little public policy work experience. All six members of the team are under 26 years of age and most are without college degrees, which is a known signature characteristic for Musk-led company employees where money and knowing how to obey orders are more important than a broad range education. The youngest team member is reported to be a 19-year-old college freshman heir to the LesserEvil popcorn company fortune.
The DOGE department power is growing rapidly. They now have access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, restricted parts of the General Services Administration buildings, and access to IT systems which houses sensitive information including federal payroll information, addresses, contact info, and social security numbers. This is particularly alarming considering plans that Musk has to make Twitter X a payment processing service. The direction and lack of transparency at DOGE has opened the eyes of several watchdog organizations and some members of Congress.
