INTERVIEW: Staring into the DOGE abyss with WIRED’s Tim Marchman

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration two months ago, Elon Musk and his associates at DOGE have purged whole government agencies of funding and jobs, falsely claimed billions of dollars of savings, and demanded that all federal workers justify their continued employment in an email. Many of these maneuvers have been challenged or reversed in federal court, but nearly every day new and unprecedented measures are announced that appear to threaten longstanding functions of the US government.

The pace of these events has been dizzying, and despite promises of transparency, much about DOGE’s operations remains shrouded in secrecy. But since Trump took office, journalists at WIRED magazine have quickly published scoop upon scoop about DOGE’s maneuvers and the people behind them.

Earlier this month I spoke with Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of politics, science, and security (and, full disclosure, a close friend of mine), about what he and his colleagues have found looking behind the curtain at DOGE, and why a magazine founded to chronicle the dot-com boom and digital culture has managed to break so many stories about the inner workings of the federal government, often ahead of news outlets with larger staffs dedicated to covering politics and government in Washington, DC.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

THOMAS GAULKIN:  Okay Tim, I’ve known you a pretty long time, since back when you were a sportswriter covering Chicago baseball in the aughts. How does this DOGE story compare to anything else you’ve worked on in your career?

TIM MARCHMAN: I can say that staring into the abyss that is the Chicago White Sox and describing what was to be seen there probably did prepare me to work on this story better than anything else did.

Let’s take a look at the WIRED homepage at the time we’re talking: Your lead story headline is “The DOGE takeover is worse than you think.” Great. Catch us up.

DOGE is, of course, based on a 15-year-old Reddit joke about a dog that had a quizzical expression and a crypto coin based on that, that Elon Musk found very funny. And it first came up during the campaign, after Donald Trump had been shot and after Musk had endorsed him. The idea [was for] him to come in with a kind of mandate to cut costs—the figure of $2 trillion was thrown around for a while, which is about the size of the national deficit. Musk was talking about how he was going to lead a group called the Department of Government Efficiency, named after a crypto coin, to cut all this money out of the budget.

Technically, there is now a body called DOGE that is part of the United States DOGE Service, which is the renamed US Digital Service, which was basically an IT team within the government. And there’s the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which is a separate body. Basically, it’s a group of engineers, Elon Musk loyalists, people who’ve worked at his various companies (like Steve Davis, who’s the CEO of The Boring Company, and Nicole Hollander, who slept in in Musk’s offices as he was taking over Twitter) and lawyers who are in government under strange and unusual conditions; some of them are in as special government employees. It’s a special status that you can be hired into the government under, where you can only work 130 days out of a given 365-day period. And the ethics rules that apply to regular, permanent government employees don’t apply to you.

DOGE essentially took over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration through political appointments and special government employees being hired into the agencies and started dispatching people to other agencies—over 15 at this point. The typical route of entry would involve very young engineers, as young as 19, being onboarded with these agencies, demanding access to critical data and critical systems and immediately starting to schedule meetings with people in which they asked them what their jobs were, or what they’re doing. It’s basically these guys you have no idea who they are—in some cases they refuse to give their names—basically taking 15-minute meetings and demanding to know what you do and why you should continue to be employed.

The essence of it is that purportedly under the guise of finding operating efficiencies and searching through government databases for waste and fraud, you have this strike force within the government under the control of the richest man in the world, just going in, finding spending it doesn’t approve, and getting rid of it. The aim appears to be to just get rid of people who are doing anything besides statutorily obligated jobs, and to get rid of contracts and grants and spending that has been authorized by Congress but that conflicts with any number of priorities of the administration.

So this is a very frightening and confusing situation for government workers.

The loudest developments have been about federal employees being fired and funding for agencies being cancelled. These are things Musk has clearly been very enthusiastic about. But it’s also clear from your reporting that there’s a lot that Musk and DOGE aren’t talking about, that nevertheless appears to have potentially huge implications for how the government functions. What are some of the less conspicuous DOGE actions that WIRED has discovered?

Some of those things are pretty troubling. One that we reported on, for instance, was that a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez—who was working at the Treasury as part of a two-man group—had access to a couple of systems that control trillions of dollars in federal spending. We were able to report that despite denials from the Treasury Department and the White House, he had both read and write access, meaning he was able to observe the entire flow of payments coming out of the federal government—with the exception of a couple of agencies like the Defense Department and the Postal Service that originate and certify their own payments—and he actually technically had the ability to alter the code base.

There have been a lot of statements made about who had access to what, and who did what, and under what circumstances they had them. But from our reporting, there were some concerns within the Bureau of Fiscal Services, which is an agency of the Treasury, that there may have been information passed to another government agency from within the Treasury, and it seems that there was at least some interest in actually cutting off payments.

Which would be giving the 25-year-old engineer—or people to whom he answered, like Musk and ultimately Trump—the ability to exercise a sort of line-item veto over government spending.

So, on the one hand, [the story is about] dry, bureaucratic, mechanical stuff that gets into computer systems no one’s ever heard of, in agencies they’ve never heard of. And on the other hand, it’s really about who has control over making the government able to do something or not do something. That’s the fundamental question at play here.

This is a purposefully naïve question, but what’s problematic about that kind access and control?

Another story we did recently was about the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There’s a six-person DOGE team there. Four of the people in it were preexisting employees who were detailed to it. Two were new hires, people from the private sector, one whose company says he’s expected back there this summer, and the other one who is still working at his current company, according to his LinkedIn—he’s the Chief Operating Officer of an AI property technology firm that has a proprietary model that forecasts how property values are going to rise or fall in certain ZIP codes. The firm says it’s on a “long term mission to aggregate the hardest to find data.”

And so these two guys, between them, have access to five really important HUD systems. In a couple of cases, read-write access. One of the systems basically traces all HUD spending. It’s like HUD’s banking program and attracts hundreds of billions of dollars in spending. Another one controls who within HUD has access to which systems at HUD—so you can, in theory, grant permissions using that system to give people access to data. So the level of access to information is really concerning, just from a security perspective—these databases have really sensitive information about people, their personal finances, their medical histories in some cases, personal testimonies of the kind you sometimes need to offer to get access to certain government services. And they’re in the control of people who are not career civil servants. They’re from the private sector.

And this is hardly the only case where this is going on. At the Treasury, one of the DOGE guys is the head of a group called Cloud Software Group that has millions and millions of dollars of contracts with the Treasury. So there’s this level of double dipping, where people are working for the government at the same time they’re still very much involved in the private sector.

Also, I keep talking about systems; a lot of these systems are very old, you know? They have code that is written in languages that nobody really uses anymore. They’re custom-built systems. They’re not something you just get right off the shelf. And they can be broken. They can just stop working if people fuss around with them or add code to them or are poking at them. And in normal cases, an engineer who was working on one of these systems, it would take him months to get up to speed just on how it works, to be able to analyze what it’s doing, let alone usefully analyze the data that it’s handling. And instead, we have these very young engineers, some with backgrounds that would normally not permit them, according to experts, to pass the security check process to work with them, who are not only working with them, but doing so across a half dozen or more different agencies.

So the speed with which all this is happening is really a little bit unsettling. Because you can’t have somebody simultaneously looking at all this data across all these agencies that are enormously complicated and between them touch on the lives of pretty much every American citizen and expect that they’re going to be able to make judicious choices about anything from how IT upgrades could make things work better and safer to whether or not the government should, in fact, be paying people whose job is to handle plutonium.

It’s just not possible with the amount of people involved here—we don’t have an exact number, but it’s on the order of about 50—you can’t have a group of 50 people come and in a month, spread out throughout the entire government and be able to usefully analyze all the stuff that they have access to, let alone be making good choices. So that’s kind of the core concern.

And then you have these tactics that would make sense if you were taking over a small startup that made, you know, an app so you could use AI with your blender—it would make sense to do that, right? “We’re gonna take a look at the books. We’re gonna figure out where our money’s going. Why are we spending all this money on newspaper, magazine subscriptions? We’re losing money? Do we really need to be spending that? Let’s cut it…” Makes sense in that environment.

But when you’re talking about whether people who work for the National Institutes of Health need to be able to access databases and medical journals, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. I don’t think it’s really about efficiency, especially because the places that are really being cut, that’s not even where the money is. The cause of the budget deficit isn’t that government agencies have access to Politico Pro so they can get up to minute information about what legislation is being introduced or what regulatory changes are being floated. That’s not why there’s a large budget deficit.

And the numbers that Musk and DOGE are touting, that they put out themselves, have ended up being wrong and full of errors. That doesn’t inspire confidence either.

It’s pretty ridiculous. I believe it was The Washington Post that ran this down (the Post and the New York Times and other outlets have done really good work on this), but there was a DOGE report that listed all the money they had saved, and the five biggest items added up to $10 billion. And it turned out that there was actually about $19 million in savings. There was stuff like $8 billion in savings that turned out to actually be $8 million. There are all sorts of instances of contracts that expired years ago that they claim to have canceled, just exactly what you would expect if you were attempting to do this vast amount of work across a vast number of agencies, with people who had no real experience in those agencies or with those systems.

One of the things that I feel gets lost a little bit in this discussion is that the government has many people whose job it is to analyze disbursements and contracts, to see if they’re being efficient. It has internal teams that are, or were, tasked specifically with making government IT systems more efficient and interoperable and transparent. And when it comes to what the government spends, for the most part, that’s all online; there aren’t big hidden mysteries here—if you need to access internal systems that handle disbursements, you can just go to one of many websites that track these things. I mean, I do this as a reporter all the time, and have for a long time; if you want to learn what a government agency is spending, you can generally just go look at their contracts. It’s posted online.

Let’s back up and talk about why WIRED took the lead on this story in the first place. It’s not like WIRED suddenly started covering politics because of this election. But there’s something notably different about the way your reporting has come into the fore here. How did that happen?

Obviously, WIRED had covered politics before. But last year, Katie Drummond, our global editorial director, decided that—with the election coming up, and with the increase of Silicon Valley in DC as a locus of power and the increase in crossover between tech and politics—that we needed a team to cover that directly. So we brought on editors, brought on reporters. I was brought on as one of those editors. I oversee the politics, security, and science teams to cover that.

After Musk came out [for Trump], we started focusing a lot more thought, reporting, time, and resources on Musk in particular, and also on other consequential figures who were coming out in favor of MAGA, in favor of Trump. As this idea about Musk wanting to cut—the number changes over time, $2 trillion or $1 trillion, which is still an absurd amount of money to just cut out of the federal government—as he began talking about this more, it was clear that he was going to be given some sort of power to do this. And our basic questions were just very straight reporting questions: Who are these people? What is their status going to be? What departments are they going to work in? What are the legal authorities they’re going to be working under?

So when people have asked how we got ahead of [other news organizations] on this reporting, and how we were kind of early to figure out some of what was going on in the government, I don’t really see a lot of magic to it. We thought it was very obviously important that the richest man in the world was coming in to serve in the government in some capacity, and we were very interested in what specifically he was going to do.

And the reason we were thinking about that is because we were paying attention to what he was saying. We were paying attention to what Donald Trump was saying. We were paying attention to what powerful Republicans were saying about what was going to be going on in this administration.

WIRED was clearly able to do that before anybody else really was able to, at least initially. How? Were people inside DOGE or the various agencies it was investigating more willing to talk to you? What made your reporting more effective than basically every other media organization, especially in the early stages?

I don’t want to talk about our reporting tactics. What we’ve reported speaks for itself. But I think pretty clearly we’ve been able to get access to sources within the government and documents that are generated within the government. And I think probably two things help with that. One is that we’ve been very clear about how to securely communicate with us, and we have a long track record of protecting people’s privacy and security.

And another thing is that, because we’re a technology publication, we have reporters who have covered technology and technology companies, who, even if they don’t specifically know a given system, know how to think about systems and can kind of grasp the significance of what they’re being told. In some cases, that helps us figure out what’s going on more easily than at places that are maybe more focused on electoral politics.

My colleague, Zoe Schiffer, who’s the director of our business coverage, she literally wrote the book on Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which is a direct parallel to what’s happening in government. He bought Twitter, he came in, he started firing people. He turned off parts of the systems that kept Twitter running, and some of them stopped working. It’s a very, very, very aggressive way of taking control of an enterprise and remaking it in your own image. That’s what he’s done before with other enterprises he’s been involved in. And so when you have people who are familiar with the way he operates and the speed at which he operates and the aggressiveness with which he operates, they get that. That’ll help you kind of ask the right questions and start to tease out patterns.

So how big is the group assigned to this story?

Well, I don’t know that we so much have a specific group of people assigned to it. On our core politics team we have an editor, Leah Feiger, who’s wonderful, and she has four reporters on the desk. There’s me. But we also have people all over the newsroom covering this—our business team, our security team, our science team, our gear team. I don’t want to leave anybody out, but literally, reporters from every single part of the newsroom have been breaking news on this, and that’s really cool.

I think part of the reason that’s been happening is because the activity has been so widespread. It’s not just a politics story. It’s one that touches on the Department of Transportation. So if you’re someone who’s reporting on cars and aviation, then you’re going to have insight there. And this touches the National Institutes of Health and the USDA and the FDA. So if you’re someone who’s covering agriculture or biotech or climate, again these are areas you’re going to know about. You’re going to have sources there. And perhaps most importantly, by knowing the field, you’re going to have a good sense of which questions to ask and what parts of things are critical.

A lot of reporters doing this work are people who came up through places like Gawker and Vice and other non-traditional news sites. How do you think that prepared them to cover this crazy story?

I think that’s a really good point. We’ve got a lot of people here from Gizmodo, which was Gawker’s tech site, a fair number of people. And if you were at Gawker in particular, you take some of these powerful tech people very seriously and what they say and what their professed aims are, right? [Editor’s note: Gawker was bankrupted and shuttered in 2016 after being ordered to pay $140 million in a lawsuit brought by former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was bankrolled by Peter Thiel—a founder of Palantir and co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk—in apparent retribution for a 2007 Gawker article that outed Thiel as gay. Palantir is a data-analysis company with nearly $2.5 billion in federal government and defense contracts since 2009.]

And so that’s one part of it. And another part of it is that people who have been in these digital media newsrooms over the last 15 years have seen these waves of private equity and venture capital take over their newsrooms in ways that have been pretty anti-labor; that probably gives them some insight into what people are going through in the federal government right now.

I’ve been in newsrooms where people you don’t know start coming in and asking everybody what they do in ways that make it clear they don’t think very highly of your enterprise or really care very much what your answers are. And I think that experience gives you some sense of what the overall patterns are, and where the places to start looking are, and what the right questions to ask are.

And then I think there’s just a mechanical thing about coming out of some of those newsrooms that gives you a lot of experience in iterative reporting, because of the publishing format. First off, you’re covering a story as an ongoing thing, which is, of course, also a newspaper thing. But also, because you’re not the AP [wire service], your sourcing is different. It’s closer to the working level. If you were working at Gawker, and you were covering the White House, you probably weren’t calling up the chief of staff on the phone to figure out what was going on, right? You were probably going elsewhere. And so I think their reporters who came up that way, who were in newsrooms all over the place, including the biggest newsrooms in the country—if they want to know how DOGE is working, their initial instinct isn’t necessarily to call up Elon Musk or Steve Davis. Their initial instinct might be to talk to the people who are being affected by this, or the people who are interfacing with it. And I think those reporters are probably not going to be very easily stymied by not getting straight answers from the people at the very top of the administration.

And all of this seems to be paying off: The AP reported that WIRED subscriptions shot up by 62,500 just in the first couple of weeks of February. What feedback are you getting from readers?

Everyone should go to wired.com! But, anecdotally, I think people are really responding to the fact that it’s really pretty nuts-and-bolts reporting. It’s just facts. We’re not part of any resistance here. We’re not setting ourselves in opposition to the administration. We’re trying to figure out what’s happening in the government and to tell people as much as we know about it, as comprehensively as we can. And so I really think that’s what people are responding to—they’re getting really in-depth, at times relatively technical reporting that they’re not going to get other places.

And that’s not to say other places aren’t doing fantastic stuff, because they are; ProPublica and Reuters and Bloomberg and the Times and The Washington Post all really stand out to me. And there are tons of places besides. But I think we’ve been able to get some pretty good scoops and get them pretty consistently. And that, to me, is like the coin of the realm—it’s new information and being able to put it in the proper context, not just have some disconnected, random stuff. We’ve managed to be fairly authoritative on some areas and have some new news, and that’s a good place to be.

So is it getting harder to report as time goes on, as people and whole offices leave government or are threatened with termination? Is it becoming more difficult to find out what’s going on inside these agencies, and what systems are being tracked?

Well, I think, on the one hand, the government is just so big. It’s millions of people; I don’t really view that part as much of a concern. I think there are plenty of people who are going to want to share information with reporters if they think there’s a reason to do so, and I think there are clearly a lot of people who are willing to do so. Because, for all the secrecy with which was this was supposed to be carried out, you can certainly read about it, not just in WIRED but in a lot of places, pretty much as it’s happening.

Is it clear from your reporting on of all this, one way or another, whether there’s a sort of intentionality around DOGE’s apparent bull-in-a-china-shop approach? Or do they simply not care about the harmful effects? Or is it more that they’re just being, well, sort of stupid?

I really couldn’t say. I don’t like to get into intentionality at all without talking to people. But I do think it’s fair to say that at the scale these personnel cuts are happening, especially, there’s no way for there to be any real process of review to make sure that you’re not firing, like, the one guy who knows how to handle plutonium. So I don’t think you have to get into any questions about intention, intentionality, either way—it’s just if you’re setting up a system where you’re going to have things like this happen, it evidences a certain level of carelessness or recklessness, or however you want to put it, just inherently. And that’s a shame.

And honestly, one of the things that I’ve been really impressed about from our reporting is the level of care and concern that government employees have for what they’re doing, and the level of importance of it. And I think if there aren’t disasters—like the one guy who knows how to handle some kind of fissile material getting accidentally fired and then popping up in some scary foreign country—it’s going to be because, in really corny ways, these are really, really patriotic people, and they really believe in and care about what they’re doing. And I wish they were getting paid back for that in good ways, rather than this.