Pure Gold: The DOGE Staffers Who Resigned Left a Mistake in Their Letter, Proving Just How Bad They Really Were

Talk about a self-own.

As you may have heard — since the media decided to make a big deal about it — a bunch of Department of Government Efficiency staffers have decided to resign en masse because they say they can’t do their job without violating the Constitution.

This isn’t a big deal for reasons we’ll get to in a second. However, what is a big deal is what they admitted in the letter, in what one can only assume is a massive oversight: They basically agreed that, when they swore that oath, they were lying. Beautiful, that.

So, just in case you missed this story — it was hard to, considering political media was pushing it like entertainment media pushes the importance of Zendaya’s career (i.e., far, far in excess of what it merits) — here’s the kind of breathless coverage it merited from the Associated Press: “More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to ‘dismantle critical public services.’”

“The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists, designers and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce,” the AP went on to note. “It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.”

Actually, it does nothing of the sort; it’s unclear whether AP reporters Brian Slodysko and Byron Tau, whose byline was on the report, understood how DOGE was established, or simply decided not to it fully with readers and just glaze over it, but this was entirely predictable.

Aside from “[m]ore than 20 civil service employees” quitting (actually 21, technically “more than 20” but definitely pushing the need for deploying that vague verbiage regarding the number) getting described as a “mass resignation” being a bit like moderate turbulence on a transatlantic flight being called “a major air disaster,” expect more of an exodus from DOGE — since it was essentially hewn by executive order out of an almost entirely useless government agency called the United States Digital Service that was established under the Obama administration.

Repurposing the USDS — a bureau which, if you’ve seen it passed around in the wake of the DOGE story, is the ultimate example of the “What would you say … you do here?” meme from “Office Space” — was a shrewd move on the part of the Trump administration, since it meant DOGE essentially already existed and, therefore, is subject to far fewer hurdles to its continued existence. (It also gives birth to a brilliant bit of irony: Obama basically created DOGE. Thanks, Barack!)

Anyway, the AP report mentioned that “[t]he staffers who resigned had worked for the United States Digital Service, but said their duties were being integrated into DOGE,” without explaining that USDS is now DOGE, full stop, and is in the process of being reorganized that way.

However, that means that USDS bureaucrats are still hanging around the joint — and if they can’t actively sabotage DOGE or continue collecting paychecks by being holes in the air in government offices (or their own homes, as the case may be), they might as well quit and leak their tell-off to the media, which then covers this as if it’s a major event.

They probably should have re-read that first, however, before it was leaked.

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the staffers wrote in the collective resignation . “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

Read that again.

Their job, as civil servants, was to serve no matter who the president was. They knew that when they took the oath. They say that.

They also knew they were working at an agency with a broad and obscure purview, except that it mostly had to do with the digital footprint of the U.S. government. From the “Our Mission” page of the USDS’ website, which is still up despite the repurposing to DOGE: “We collaborate with public servants throughout the government to address some of the most critical needs and ultimately deliver a better government experience to people. We work across multiple agencies and bring best practices from our various disciplines, which include engineering, product, design, procurement, data science, operations, talent, and communications.”

I again pose the Bobs’ question from “Office Space”: What would you say … you do here? Because it sounds like pretty much whatever the government wants you to do at that point in time; the main reason the USDS was established in the first place was because of the trainwreck that was the roll-out of Healthcare.gov, the infamous Obamacare portal. Since then, it’s mostly done whatever digital work suited the administration in charge.

So they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and do their duties regardless of administration at a vague, distal limb of the Beltway leviathan and now admit, actually, they didn’t really mean it if they’re being asked to be civil servants under a president that makes them do something they disagreed with.

TL;DR: They lied when they took the oath required for their job. They now expect to be treated sympathetically.

Now, this is a non-story; Musk himself noted on X that the staffers were “Dem political holdovers” that “would have been fired had they not resigned,” and the rest of the letter seems to bear that out.

More fake news from Associated Propaganda.

These were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office.

They would have been fired had they not resigned.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025

“All previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service,” the AP’s report continued. “According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.” [Emphasis mine.]

Yes, those “nonpartisan” senior members of Google and Amazon who went to work for the federal government under an agency established by Barack Obama grilled by DOGE staffers who were “young and seemed guided by ideology.” And the AP wonders why few conservatives are shedding a tear over their partially revoked press credentials.

Furthermore, the resigning employees were outraged over the fact that 40 staffers in the USDS were laid off earlier in the month, despite the fact that the USDS is basically being transformed into something else entirely.

“These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the letter read.

“Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s [sic] data less safe.”

Right. The idea that the USDS is efficient, nonpartisan, understaffed, and definitely necessary is laughable, as is the idea that it protects Americans’ data. (It probably didn’t help that this story broke on the same day as it was disclosed that a contractor for the IRS released the tax information of 400,000 Americans, according to Politico; if USDS is so vital in protecting Americans’ data, they certainly dropped the ball on that one.)

If it is all so vital, of course, these individuals would stay on to complete the tasks they swore to do. But because the USDS is now DOGE and they don’t like that someone’s looking at government bloat, they’re out the door. As for that oath, I guess they had their fingers crossed behind their back when they took it. Either way, the admission is a huge mistake for the centerpiece of a pseudo-story intended to cast distrust on DOGE, which instead made the resigning employees look like the partisan hacks.

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