Scott Patterson
Appearances
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
My reporting shows that at 12.01 p.m. on January 20th, the day that Trump was inaugurated, there were some people from Doge arriving at this obscure agency called the Office of Personnel Management.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
They were at OPM demanding access to computer systems. They meet some resistance by people who don't know or believe that they have this authorization, but they very quickly get it. And within about a half an hour, they are in the OPM systems and pretty quickly able to access a large amount of information that's in those systems.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
They're generally young men. It's, you know, a bunch of young computer programmers, many of whom had worked at Musk companies, like, you know, internships at SpaceX or Tesla or Neuralink.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
You know, if your goal was to reduce the size of the federal workforce, there'd be no better place because that is the human resources arm of the federal workforce.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
Their first project was putting together this mass email system. And, you know, I was told that some of these people, even before the inauguration, had met with people at OPM and asked about this. They asked, do you have a system where you can email the entire federal workforce?
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
That's why they went to OPM, was to use it as a sort of cudgel against the federal workforce to try to reduce the size of it, to get people to quit and to ultimately fire people as well.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
The way they operate is they insulate themselves from the career staff. And so at OPM, they set up shop on the fifth floor of the building where the senior leadership works and have kind of closed themselves off from the rest of the career staff, many of whom they moved to another floor.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
I was told that there's guards in that room and they have printouts of the faces of people who are approved being able to interact with them. They typically remove access to the computer systems from a lot of the career staff, so they can't even get in and do their work anymore.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
You know, they do have a playbook. I've talked to people in multiple agencies, and they come in sort of guns blazing, very aggressive. They demand access to these computer systems. You know, at first they get so-called read-only access where they can look at things, but then they just push it and push it and push it until they have full what's called administrative access.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
And that kind of took people aback because it's got all of this information about the US federal workforce inside those computers. You know, sensitive information, information about their healthcare, their social security numbers, their families, all sorts of things. And that's very tightly guarded information.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
we did start to see some pushback within the Trump cabinet. So there were some leaders of departments, including the FBI, who told employees not to respond to that. And it's kind of easy to see why, because you don't want FBI agents or CIA agents or other people in secrecy agencies saying what they did last week. So that has caused some of the biggest pushback that we've seen so far.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
You know, Susie Wiles, the chief of staff of the White House, has pretty recently asked Elon to provide updates on what their plans are several times a week. And this is because they've been caught by surprise by some of the things that Doge is doing, either at the agencies or, you know, with the emails.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
And I think they want to have a little bit more preparation, you know, to be able to respond to these things and maybe, you know, talk them down a little bit from some of the more extreme plans that they may have. And I think that, you know, it's also just Elon is seen as a wild card. They don't know what he's going to do next. He could be anything.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations have shown that a lot of the claims of things and savings that they've accomplished are illusions, often contracts that didn't even exist or multiple contracts or claiming billions of dollars in savings when actually it was a couple million in one case.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
So that part, which is kind of what they claim to be their number one goal, has so far been pretty much a flop.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
$2 trillion is not going to happen. You would have to eliminate a large part of the U.S. military or major welfare programs, Medicaid, Medicare. And anyway, that was never realistic. To achieve savings like that, you would have to have an act of Congress, and Congress is doing that. They're putting a budget together. They say they will make major cuts to big programs, including Medicaid.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
But they're actually still, because they're They have massive tax cuts. They don't have enough cuts to equal out the amount that they're going to lose from the tax cuts. And Musk initially said $2 trillion. He dialed that back to $1 trillion. That's still totally unrealistic.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
I don't think there's any way we can know. I think they've surprised us from the jump. Nobody that I know of had any idea that Musk was going to do this on such a scale. And when you own a company, if it fails, he loses his money, he goes home, you know, it's his problem. This is a different animal he's dealing with. right now, the entire American federal government.
The Journal.
Inside DOGE's Campaign of Secrecy
So without a doubt, it will be interesting to see what happens next. And I will be front seat eating popcorn.