From: HR hr@opm.gov
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2025
Subject: What did you do last week?
Importance: High
Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.
Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.
When she noticed the email that Saturday night, Kathleen Walters already had far too much going on in her life. Number one was figuring out if the lump in her breast that her doctor had just detected was a tumour. Half of her known blood relatives had died of cancer, and she was now 52: the lump needed understanding.
Whoever had sent this email asking her to list five things she’d done at work was now demanding that all these people inside the IRS share information that, in many cases, should never be shared. She thought it was nuts.
She responded quickly, and vaguely, with five things she had done the previous week, all the while feeling sure no one would ever read what she wrote. Her phone was already exploding with questions from her subordinates – a few of whom were saying that their replies were bouncing back with a “mailbox is full” notice. Now she had to sit and think about how to minimise the damage that might be caused by 100,000 IRS employees thinking that they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t supply some detailed answer about what they’d done during their work week. A meaningful percentage risked being tossed in jail if they described what they did in an email. It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge that some specific person had or had not filed a tax return. “People don’t understand what the IRS does,” said Kathleen.
The email came as a surprise, but then the IRS was suddenly full of surprises. Nine days earlier, on 13 February, a Thursday, the first Doge person turned up in the lobby, unannounced, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the IRS’s human capital department. There’s a kid down here who said he needs to get into the building, he said. The kid’s name was Gavin Kliger.
Traci called her counterpart at the Treasury department, as the IRS sits inside Treasury, and Treasury always cleared any new political appointees; Treasury had no record of anyone named Gavin Kliger. Traci then called Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management – but he had no idea what was going on. Finally, she called security and asked them to escort the young man to her office.
Gavin Kliger came with a chip on his shoulder, it seemed to Traci. He offered not even the faintest smile or the most glancing eye contact. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneaker, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked, and was, just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to Traci that he’d come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and to root out the fraud. “That’s a big job!” she said.
Anyone who worked at the IRS knew that it had its problems; fraud wasn’t likely one of them. Its technology infrastructure was a case study in government dysfunction, but its ethical infrastructure was sound. Like all federal employees, its staff wasn’t allowed to accept more than a free cup of coffee from anyone who might want something from their agency.
Gavin Kliger, in contrast, struck Traci as problematic. He’d somehow laid his hands on badges granting him access to some crazy number of government buildings. His backpack was stuffed with government-issue phones and at least four laptops – and he was now insisting that Traci supply him with an IRS phone and laptop. He also demanded his own IRS email address, access to computer systems with all the taxpayer information, and a meeting with the acting IRS commissioner, Doug O’Donnell. As Gavin sat there, Traci called Treasury again. That guy you said didn’t exist is now here sitting in my office. What do y’all want me to do with him?
The Treasury guy went away, then came back and said that Gavin Kliger had been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to Doge – whatever that meant.
In her nine years running human capital departments at various federal agencies, Traci had never seen a new political appointee just turn up in the lobby and demand access to the computer systems. “None of this is normal,” she said, “but we’re still trying to be nice.” She explained to Gavin the IRS rules: before anyone was allowed to work inside the building, he needed to pass a tax audit.
I don’t need to do that, he said.
Gavin Kliger came with a chip on his shoulder, it seemed to Traci. He offered not even the faintest smile or the most glancing eye contact. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneaker, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked, and was, just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to Traci that he’d come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and to root out the fraud. “That’s a big job!” she said.
Anyone who worked at the IRS knew that it had its problems; fraud wasn’t likely one of them. Its technology infrastructure was a case study in government dysfunction, but its ethical infrastructure was sound. Like all federal employees, its staff wasn’t allowed to accept more than a free cup of coffee from anyone who might want something from their agency.
Gavin Kliger, in contrast, struck Traci as problematic. He’d somehow laid his hands on badges granting him access to some crazy number of government buildings. His backpack was stuffed with government-issue phones and at least four laptops – and he was now insisting that Traci supply him with an IRS phone and laptop. He also demanded his own IRS email address, access to computer systems with all the taxpayer information, and a meeting with the acting IRS commissioner, Doug O’Donnell. As Gavin sat there, Traci called Treasury again. That guy you said didn’t exist is now here sitting in my office. What do y’all want me to do with him?
The Treasury guy went away, then came back and said that Gavin Kliger had been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to Doge – whatever that meant.
In her nine years running human capital departments at various federal agencies, Traci had never seen a new political appointee just turn up in the lobby and demand access to the computer systems. “None of this is normal,” she said, “but we’re still trying to be nice.” She explained to Gavin the IRS rules: before anyone was allowed to work inside the building, he needed to pass a tax audit.
I don’t need to do that, he said.
Yes, you do, she replied.
No, I don’t, he said.
Yes, you do, she replied.
They went back and forth like that a bit until finally Gavin relented. Traci then explained that after he passed the audit, he’d need to be given the mandatory presentations about ethics and taxpayer information. Gavin thought that the IRS should just let him in. “He wanted access to our systems immediately,” said Traci.
Traci’s next call, at 6.30pm that Thursday evening, was to Kathleen, to arrange for her to brief Gavin on data privacy laws and to warn her that the experience might not be entirely pleasant. If I had a kid who behaved the way he does, I’d slap the shit out of him, Traci said – but then Traci was from Philadelphia. Traci was always telling Kathleen that she should try a bit less hard to see the best in others.
By then word of Doge’s arrival at the IRS had spread, and Kathleen had read about them. Anyone who Googled Gavin’s name found a bit more than usually popped up about any given young Doge person. He’d grown up in southern California, where he was into Asian martial arts and the high-school marching band, then had gone on to the University of California at Berkeley. Graduating in 2020 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he’d taken a job as a programmer at Databricks. He’d also been active on X, where he’d retweeted with apparent approval posts from the white nationalists Steve Laws and Nick Fuentes. “One of Musk’s few Doge lieutenants who has embraced the spotlight,” Forbes wrote of him. Most of the other Muskrats scrubbed the internet of their presence. Gavin had written Substack pieces defending two Trump nominees, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. He’d deleted his X posts, but the Forbes writer John Hyatt had found a research tool, Web.archive, to revive and analyse them. “What emerges is a portrait of an internet edgelord and Musk and Trump superfan who has disdain for government spending, illegal immigrants, and who enjoys the odd racist and ableist joke,” he wrote.
By the time Traci called her, Kathleen was gone for the weekend and 50 miles away from the IRS building: she needed to find someone else to do Gavin’s briefing. Kathleen was white; the two women immediately below her were Black. “They’d both already read about him and were both already uncomfortable,” said Kathleen. Phyllis Grimes, her deputy, agreed to fall on the hand grenade.
Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”
It fell to Kathleen to draft the five-page agreement required by law for Gavin Kliger to be let inside the IRS building on Monday morning, 17 February. The memo that she wrote over the weekend, and that he signed, gave him access to some of the systems but, explicitly, none that contained taxpayer information.
Traci set him up in a conference room with an assistant at the beginning of the week. “People started getting these calls,” said Kathleen. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.’ ”
Doge had its own private structure in addition to its official one. Officially, President Trump created Doge with an executive order on his first day in office. The president doesn’t have the authority to create or to fund an executive agency, however. Congress does. The Trump administration dodged that problem by taking an office inside the White House created during the second Obama term, the US Digital Service, kicking out the people inside and renaming it the Department of Government Efficiency. The US Digital Service had been given the power to hire talent from the tech sector without going through the usual slow federal hiring process. This now ensured that Doge could hire whomever it wanted without any questions being asked, and make it sound official. In effect, all that Doge had done was create a corpse for itself to occupy.
The zombie killed off the spirit of the original life form. Real Doge had nothing to do with Official Doge or the former US Digital Service or any other government body. Real Doge was more like Elon Musk’s pop-up restaurant. “None of us ever signed a piece of paper saying that we were in Doge,” said one Doge insider. The people who joined either worked for one of Musk’s companies, or knew someone who did, or knew someone who knew someone who did. To be truly a member of Doge was to be included in the group Signal chat and granted access to the sleeping quarters on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration (GSA).
Official Doge employed maybe 10 guys in their 40s and 50s who wore suits and could sort of pass as ordinary political appointees, but none had access to the sixth floor at GSA. “The older guys in the suits were not there to take risks or blow things up,” said one Doge insider. It was hard to say what any of the older Doge suits did except to make way for the young guys when they showed up with explosives.
Most of Doge’s inner circle just wanted to exist in the presence of Elon Musk. “It was, Elon is my prophet, and I worship the ground he walks on,” said one of the older Doge insiders.
As a Doge member, you could get away with saying – or having said – almost anything. What you couldn’t say is that the government actually sort of worked. Or, if it didn’t work, why it didn’t work. This new game rewarded not understanding but speed. The plan was the same plan Musk had executed two years earlier at Twitter: Make sweeping statements about the incompetence and dishonesty of the people working inside the place before you know much about them. Once you’ve terrified the employees, fire them in huge numbers. If it turns out you screwed up and fired the wrong people, hire some of them back.
The people who rallied to the cause and felt qualified to execute Elon Musk’s vision for the federal government shared certain qualities. They were mostly young white males. They were mostly from upper-middle-class or rich families. Most knew or pretended to know how to program a computer. Not all of them, but enough of them for there to be a pattern, had been rejected from the most selective colleges and universities and ended up feeling they’d been screwed by the admissions process. They landed at Penn instead of Princeton, or the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard, with a grievance that added to the foundation of their politics. They thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room and couldn’t understand why the rest of the room didn’t simply stand up and cheer. In Washington they borrowed from Elon Musk their status and sense of superiority. They also seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them.
by Michael Lewis, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stephen Voss/The Guardian; CDAO[ed. Think these little Nazis have any remorse, or even the smallest inkling of how stupid and unprepared they were for such an undertaking? Not a chance. Although, they're probably not out there advertising their DOGE credentials on LinkedIn or dating websites, either (they'd never get laid again).]
