DOGE broadens sweep of federal agencies, gains access to health payment systems

Associates of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have spread out across the federal government in recent days, alarming many career employees.

The Washington Post 05-02-2025

tFebruary 5, 2025 at 6:59 p.m. EST

By Dan Diamond, Lauren Kaori Gurley, Lena H. Sun, Hannah Knowles and Emily Davies

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.”

Demonstrators gather outside the Labor Department headquarters Wednesday.
(Michael A. McCoy for The Washington Post)

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.

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.”

Protesters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday voiced their objections to the Trump administration's decision to shut down the
U.S. Agency for International Development. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

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 provide lists of employees who have less than a year of service and those who are in two-year probationary periods, said the people familiar with the requests.

In Congress on Wednesday, lawmakers fiercely debated Musk’s powers, preceding a House Oversight Committee vote on a subpoena for Musk.

“Who is this unelected billionaire that he can attempt to dismantle federal agencies, fire people, transfer them, offer them early retirement and have sweeping changes to agencies without any congressional review, oversight or concurrence?” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (Virginia), the ranking Democrat on the committee. Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) said the motion was “not debatable.” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-New Mexico) said it was “outrageous that this committee will not even entertain a motion.” Then the lawmakers began to talk over one another before a roll-call vote to table the motion passed 20-19.

Danielle Abril and Jeff Stein contributed to this report.⍐

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How Elon Musk’s deputies took over the government’s most basic functions

How Elon Musk’s deputies took over the government’s most basic functions

The Trump administration views a once-obscure federal IT unit as the “Swiss army knives” in its effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

05-02-2025 The Washington Post

By Cat Zakrzewski and Faiz Siddiqui

Elon Musk arrives on Capitol Hill for a meeting in September 2023. Musk's Department
of Government Efficiency and his allies in key agencies now have sweeping power over
the logistical backbone of the federal government. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Elon Musk’s allies are turning a once-obscure federal IT unit into the linchpin of their sweeping campaign to tear down the federal bureaucracy, sparking fears of improper overreach and chaos among tech employees in the government.

During a tense meeting Monday, employees of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) section of the General Services Administration questioned Musk ally and Tesla alum Thomas Shedd about the agency’s future, after he and a cohort of unidentified 20-somethings spent the preceding days peppering staff with questions about their accomplishments and reviews of their work. Shedd, who was named the director of the unit last month, told the workers that the administration viewed them as “Swiss army knives” who can roll out services across federal agencies.

“You guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists,” said Shedd, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post. “The way the administration sees you is you’re kind of the gold standard of how to go in and get work done at these agencies, how to understand the technical problems that they have.”

In the background of those reassurances, however, Musk’s deputies have been quietly assessing the competency and loyalties of the existing staff to determine whom to retain. The GSA, Shedd and Katie Miller, a representative for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Shedd’s comments underscore how Musk and a band of allies are harnessing tech units and other agencies that handle daily federal operations to amass sweeping control of the executive branch. Musk’s group has officially taken over the White House office formerly known as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed on Trump’s first day in office the U.S. DOGE Service. His allies are running the GSA — which manages real estate, procurement and IT — and the Office of Personnel Management, which handles HR.

With control of logistics, they’re taking extraordinary measures to slash at all parts of the government — pushing mass resignations, accessing a Treasury Department payment system, obtaining federal student loan data and challenging the very existence of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

TTS is just one prong of an apparent strategy to command the technical guts of the federal government, which undergird everything from the log-in pages for government applications to the Social Security Administration website. President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to put loyalists in charge of tech government-wide: On Tuesday, OPM in a memo ordered federal agencies to reclassify chief information officers as political positions to be chosen by the president.

Until recently, TTS’s mandate had been to make government platforms intuitive and accessible for users. The unit has employees embedded throughout agencies and influences how technology is used throughout the government, making it a powerful lever to advance Musk’s moonshot goal of slashing federal spending by $1 trillion. Shedd held another all-hands meeting with TTS staff on Wednesday, a recording of which was also obtained by The Post.

“It’s super clear that the federal government should have teams like TTS that can be deployed to solve hard technical problems,” Shedd told staff members, according to the recording. “I want to reiterate that the administration sees TTS as well as U.S. Digital Services as two pillars of technical talent, and there are large plans to bring more software technology into the federal government. And right now, we are being seen as one of those two pillars to enable that work.”

The call ran more than an hour, but staff members expressed frustration that it provided little new information. “For the record this meeting has made me feel 982374982374892374982347 times worse,” wrote one employee in the chat for the meeting, according to a screenshot viewed by The Post.

The federal government has long struggled with outdated technology, which has led to critical government websites crashing and glitching. The office that DOGE took over in the White House launched in 2014 after the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, when website crashes prevented people from signing up for new online health insurance marketplaces. The small unit has made significant gains over the past decade, but federal workers continue to struggle with outdated equipment, slow internet connections and challenges with websites.

The TTS unit includes 18F, a team that helps other federal agencies build and buy digital services. On Monday, Musk posted on X that the unit had been “deleted,” and its social media account disappeared from the social network, which Musk owns. Employees within the GSA said that they had not received internal communication about what Musk’s tweet meant, and that the unit still exists.

Musk’s team appears to be approaching its work as if the government were one of his companies, with longtime corporate lieutenants and the same drive to cut costs deeper and deeper — even if, as he said in 2023 in the wake of layoffs and steep spending cuts at X, “unfortunately there are going to be some babies thrown out with the bathwater.”

Wired previously reported on some aspects of the chaos among government tech employees.

At the Monday meeting, the plans for TTS’s role in the DOGE agenda came into focus. Shedd floated creating a “centralized place” to put government contracts so that they could be analyzed using artificial intelligence. He also proposed making coding agents — AI tools that automate computer programming tasks — available to federal agencies. He said the GSA should become a model for how agencies across the government use artificial intelligence.

Shedd also warned TTS workers that their team wouldn’t be immune from staff reductions even as demand for their tech services was set to “skyrocket.” He emphasized that the administration would be moving quickly to make drastic cuts by the end of the fiscal year.

“This is not a situation where it’s, take six months to understand the nuances of every single department and every single project, which is what I personally would prefer to do,” he said Monday, according to the recording. “This is a case of, we’re in extreme bankruptcy mode as GSA and as a larger federal government. And so the pressure to make immediate changes is immense.”

When employees pushed back on Shedd’s bankruptcy characterization, Shedd said the GSA was on track to lose $200 million in fiscal year 2025. It’s not clear how Shedd had arrived at that figure. It appeared he was applying logic more common in businesses to the operations of a federal agency.

“If this was a private company, our shareholders would be saying, ‘How do we cut $20 million from the budget this week?’ Or they’re going to pull out,” he said.

DOGE on Tuesday announced on X that it had slashed consulting contracts in the GSA, including a $23 million work order for “digital modernization Program Management Office support.” Such contracts typically support efforts to improve technology within agencies so government services are easier to access and more secure.

As Musk set his sights on different agencies, civic tech workers are beginning to fight back, launching a labor organizing effort that amassed dozens of staffers rapidly, including from TTS.

“We are a group of federal public service technologists advocating for our values, showcasing the impact of our work, and exercising our rights,” the group, CivicTechStrong, declared on a website that launched this week.

Shedd has been joined in government by others from Musk’s businesses. Amanda Scales, the chief of staff at OPM, worked for his artificial intelligence start-up xAI. Three of her six direct reports in the government previously worked at SpaceX, his rocket company.

Musk’s operation has sought to conduct its work under the cloak of secrecy; associates have declined to identify themselves in interviews with staff of the former U.S. Digital Service and TTS, according to multiple federal workers with knowledge of the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal proceedings. In many instances, Musk-affiliated advisers are withholding their last names and using anonymous personal email addresses so employees cannot identify them.

Confronted about their anonymity in an all-hands meeting on Monday, Shedd said, “We’re afraid of those folks’ names getting out and their personal lives being disrupted, which is exactly what happened last week, which is really unfortunate for them.”

Staffers found a dark irony in that answer, given how their own lives have been upended over the past two weeks. Some of their colleagues were targeted online over the weekend, as Musk heaped scorn on the work of civil servants on X while going through different agencies’ operations. Shedd promised in the Monday meeting to take steps to address the security of employees, but the workers have received far less support this week than they did during a similar incident in 2023, two people said. (The U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, threatened prosecutions this week for anyone who harasses or tries to interfere with DOGE employees, in a letter to Musk that he posted on X.)

One federal employee said the DOGE security worries are “laughable given the DOGE concerns are about an unaccountable bureaucracy,” adding that it flies in the face of the basic notion of “‘what it means to work in the government.’ … our names are public. Our salaries are public. Everything we type in slack or email is public record.”

Throughout the past two weeks, Shedd and the unidentified DOGE associates have been using questions similar to those Musk asks at Tesla and his other businesses when interviewing candidates. Musk has said he asks workers: “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.”

As young and largely inexperienced software engineers interview workers within the GSA about retaining their jobs, they ask workers to point to a recent “technical win” and explain how it came together.

“Advice: problem keep high level, how you leveraged specific tech/methods/ect to solve it, that is where detail is great,” Shedd wrote in a Slack message viewed by The Post. He explained that employees could share how they used a programming trick to speed up a database query. “What data is in that [database] is not relevant and doesn’t need to be shared.”

Shedd has also conducted surprise reviews of the code underpinning applications built by GSA staff, said one GSA employee. He was joined on a video call by two “extremely young men” who were identified only as advisers. They silently observed the entire call and did not speak. Shedd on Slack told employees the advisers were in “the onboarding process of obtaining a GSA laptop and PIV card,” a government-issued card that allows workers to access federal buildings and computer systems.

By successfully answering interview questions, filling out detailed questionnaires and submitting screenshots of their code, staffers are hoping to convince Musk’s surrogates that they are fit to continue working in the positions some have already held for years.

Shedd responded to employees’ concerns about the advisers’ presence in a Slack message on Thursday. He explained that the conversations about “problems/wins” were “a chance for you to brag about how you solved a problem.”

He acknowledged that many of the employees were embedded in agencies throughout the federal government, and he wrote, “There is no expectation that individuals would break sensitivity agreements.”

Supervisors at the GSA have also been asked to compile lists of their direct reports along with a recent work accomplishment for each — “big impact items,” as they are referred to internally — seemingly as a way to demonstrate their engineering chops, but also to thin out existing staff.

Top staff at the agency were informed Thursday of a goal to slash the agency’s budget by 50 percent compared with the 2024 fiscal year, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Musk’s team is making use of “sleep pods” that have been delivered to federal offices to work around-the-clock, which Musk indicated was part of a strategy of essentially outmaneuvering the civil service.

“DOGE is working 120 hour a week,” Musk said in an X post at 3:21 a.m. Sunday. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”

At the Monday meeting with Shedd, TTS employees asked him whether it was legal for them to work more than 40 hours a week. He referred them to human resources.

Emily Davies and Alice Crites contributed to this report.⍐

yesterda

Australia’s ban on DeepSeek reflects ideological bias

 Australia’s ban on DeepSeek reflects ideological bias, aligning with US restrictions on Chinese tech: expert

By 

Liu Caiyu

 and Li YaweiPublished: Feb 05, 2025

Australia has banned all services from Chinese tech company DeepSeek on government systems and devices, a move that Chinese AI experts on Wednesday criticized as ideologically driven and indicative of some Western countries' inability to assess China's technological rise fairly and objectively.
DeepSeek has been banned from Australian federal government computers and mobile devices after authorities deemed it "an unacceptable risk" to national security, Australian media ABC reported. 
Under the new ban, all government bodies, except corporate organizations like Australia Post and the ABC, must immediately remove all DeepSeek products from their devices, the report said.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke claimed the decision was based on security risks to government systems and assets, rather than because of the app's country of origin - China, according to Guardian. 
The ban follows similar moves by US agencies including NASA and the Pentagon. Besides, Italy's data protection authority has reportedly blocked access to DeepSeek.
"Australia's move is clearly driven by ideological discrimination, not technological concerns," Liu Wei, director of the Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told the Global Times. "When US federal agencies take steps to contain Chinese technology, Australia seems compelled to follow suit," the expert added.
"If Australia were genuinely citing technological risks to national security, it should also have blocked US-based OpenAI and other tech companies that have integrated with DeepSeek. Yet, there is no indication that the Australian government will take similar action against US-based AI firms," Liu stated.
Chinese technology has not been treated fairly and objectively, the Chinese AI expert emphasized. 
DeepSeek has rapidly ascended the global download rankings, with numerous experts highlighting its capability to provide intricate answers while requiring minimal computational power.
Accusations to smear the Chinese tech company are entirely unfounded and lack any solid basis, Zhang Linghan, from China University of Political Science and Law and also a Chinese expert of the High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 
They seem to reflect more of the Western world's futile attempts to suppress Chinese technological advancements, underscoring the growing anxiety over China's expanding technological influence, Zhang noted. 
The global sensation and anxiety sparked by DeepSeek demonstrates that technological containment and restrictions do not work. This is a lesson the whole world, especially the US, should learn, said Fu Cong, China's permanent representative to the United Nations (UN), in response to a question regarding DeepSeek and AI cooperation between China and the US. 
"From Huawei to TikTok, and now to DeepSeek - how many more does the US want to impose a ban [on]?" Fu asked.
"We don't need more bans," Fu pointed out, noting that China and the US, as two leading nations in AI, cannot afford not to cooperate. "Only through joint efforts can we bridge the digital and intelligence divide, particularly ensuring that the Global South benefits equally in AI development," he stressed.
"Providing the world with a public good, a tool that benefits the nation and its people, and an inclusive instrument is an unstoppable force," Qin An, deputy director of the expert committee on counter-terrorism and cyber security governance at the China Society of Police Law, told the Global Times. 
The best way to counter those attempting to undermine Chinese innovation is to leverage our strength and let the world experience DeepSeek's technological advantages, Qin said.⍐

Musk creates new power base in Washington with takeover of US agencies

 Musk creates new power base in Washington with takeover of US agencies

By Tim Reid and Marisa Taylor

February 5, 2025Summary

• Musk's takeover causes panic among some federal workers
• DOGE's creation faces lawsuits from unions and watchdogs
• Trump sets out to restructure government

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's rapid takeover of two U.S. government agencies has enabled the South African-born billionaire to exert unprecedented control over America's 2.2-million-member federal workforce and begin a dramatic reshaping of government.

The world's richest man and an ally of President Donald Trump, Musk, 53, has in two weeks created a new center of power in Washington as he executes Trump's cost-cutting initiative to reduce the size of the U.S. government.The CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab and founder of SpaceX, Musk has acted swiftly since Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, deploying teams of current and former employees of his companies as his agents. Musk's actions have fostered a wave of panic among government workers and public protests in Washington and at times have threatened to overshadow Trump's own agenda.Trump's up-and-down trade war with neighboring Canada and Mexico vied this week for space on front pages with Musk's effort to shut down USAID, the Agency for International Development, America's main humanitarian aid agency to the world. Musk's efforts are part of a massive government restructuring by Trump, who has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.Americans are witnessing "an extraordinary centralization of power in someone who lacks a top-level security clearance and has not been subject to any Senate confirmation process," said Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan."Musk has unprecedented and centralized control of the basic plumbing of government," he added. Nonetheless, Musk operates at Trump's pleasure. The president told reporters on Monday that the billionaire had to seek approval from the White House for any of his actions." Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval, and we'll give him the approval, where appropriate; where not appropriate, we won't. But he reports in. "A White House source said, "those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities." Asked who they are more worried about when it comes to the prospect of being fired, an employee of the General Services Administration that manages federal property and services said: "Musk. No one is really talking about Trump. "Trump has put Musk in charge of what both men call the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite its name, it is not a department, Musk does not draw a government salary, and DOGE's creation immediately drew lawsuits from government unions, watchdogs and public interest groups.Exactly who makes up DOGE is unclear. The Trump administration has not released a list of DOGE employees. Nor has it said how they are being paid, or how many have entered each agency. Musk and his DOGE lieutenants have taken over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration along with their computer systems.OPM is the human resources arm of the U.S. government, overseeing 2.2 million government workers. From there, emails have been sent out in the past week offering federal employees financial incentives to quit. The GSA oversees most government contracts and manages federal property. At least four current and former Musk aides are part of a team that has taken over OPM, shutting out some senior managers from their own computer systems, sources told Reuters. Musk visited the GSA last Thursday, an official said, while members of his team moved into the agency. On Friday, a Musk team gained access to the U.S. Treasury Department's payment system, which sends out more than $6 trillion a year on behalf of federal agencies and contains the personal information of millions of Americans who receive Social Security payments, tax refunds and other monies from government.Michael Linden, a senior official during the administration of former President Joe Biden at the Office of Management and Budget, a powerful agency that oversees the federal budget, said the access by Musk's aides to payment systems gives them extraordinary potential power."They could get to pick and choose which payments the federal government makes," Linden said in an interview.Neither Musk nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment.Trump has repeatedly said that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient, and needs to be downsized. He also accuses many federal workers of being liberal ideologues out to thwart his agenda.MUSK EXCEEDING HIS AUTHORITY"Those of us who have worked at Elon's companies can see his fingerprints all over what's happening inside the federal government right now," said Thomas Moline, a former SpaceX senior avionics engineer. "It's a very seat-of-the-pants affair with Elon's loyalists scrambling to execute his every whim and desire as fast as possible."Governance experts say Musk appears to have already gone beyond the mandate granted by the executive order Trump signed setting up DOGE on Jan. 20.That order mandated it to modernize federal technology and software "to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity." Other orders on hiring freezes and recruitment say DOGE should work with other agencies to make recommendations.Musk and his aides appear to be doing much more than simply making recommendations.Employees from DOGE have clashed with security officials over access to sensitive information at the Washington headquarters of USAID and have been heavily involved in the downsizing of the agency.Fear is gripping many civil servants, and they have taken to Reddit, Signal and Facebook to report on what is going on inside their agencies and discuss how to respond. They also warn that DOGE personnel are watermarking and otherwise embedding identifiers like additional spacing in emails to track down suspected leakers.Musk's critics, including Democratic lawmakers, have accused him of a hostile takeover of government. Federal worker unions sued to block Musk's access to sensitive computer systems."We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk," U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, told reporters during a protest outside USAID headquarters.'FORK IN THE ROAD'Echoing language Musk used when he slashed Twitter's workforce after buying the social media company in 2022, an email was sent to all government employees titled "Fork in the Road" offering them deferred resignation, a scheme to pay workers through September if they offered to resign by Feb. 6.A second email encouraged government workers to seek more productive jobs in the private sector. Federal employee unions have urged workers not to take the offer, warning it may not be legal, as it is unclear how the payoffs would be funded.Unions representing the employees filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to block the administration's plan to offer buyouts, even as a U.S. official told Reuters that more than 20,000 employees were planning on quitting.Nick Bednar, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, said it was deeply concerning that Musk and his aides have such enormous power over federal personnel and federal payments "when they seemingly have very little accountability."It was also extraordinary that Musk, whose companies have multiple contracts with the U.S. government, had been put in a position that would raise so many questions about conflicts of interest, he said.⍐