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.

By now, you’ve probably heard — thanks to the media blowing it up into a headline event — that a group of staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has collectively walked off the job. Their reason? They claim they can’t fulfill their duties without trampling on the Constitution.

This, in itself, isn’t particularly newsworthy — we’ll explain why shortly — but what is significant is the embarrassing confession they made in their resignation letter. In what can only be described as a stunning lack of self-awareness, they effectively admitted that they never meant a word of the oath they swore when they took the job. Beautiful, that.

If you somehow missed this saga — which would have been difficult given how political outlets hyped it up the way entertainment media treats Zendaya’s every move (in other words, far more attention than it deserved) — here’s how the Associated Press breathlessly reported it: “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 AP continued: “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. 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.”

Except… none of that is really true. Whether AP reporters Brian Slodysko and Byron Tau failed to grasp how DOGE was formed — or simply chose to omit that context to fit a preferred narrative — the reality is, this was entirely foreseeable.

Let’s set aside the hyperbolic framing of “[m]ore than 20 civil service employees” quitting (the actual count was 21, so yes, technically “more than 20,” but calling that a “mass resignation” is like calling light turbulence a “near-crash”). What’s more important is that this is only the first wave of departures from DOGE — a department that came into existence through executive order by repurposing the nearly pointless United States Digital Service (USDS), an Obama-era creation.

The USDS — a prime candidate for the “What would you say… you do here?” meme from Office Space — became DOGE practically overnight, a clever move by the Trump administration that allowed DOGE to bypass most of the red tape that comes with building a new agency from scratch. Ironically, this means Obama himself indirectly created DOGE. Thanks, Barack!

The AP article did note that “[t]he staffers who resigned had worked for the United States Digital Service, but said their duties were being integrated into DOGE,” but it conveniently left out the fact that the USDS is now DOGE, full stop, with its structure being fully reshaped in that direction.

That leaves USDS veterans still lingering within the department — and, once it became clear they couldn’t either quietly undermine DOGE from within or coast along collecting paychecks while doing next to nothing, their next best option was to resign and leak a self-righteous email to the press, hoping it would be treated like some grand act of courage.

They probably should have proofread that email a bit more carefully before handing it off.

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

Read that again.

Their literal job, as civil servants, is to serve under any president. They acknowledged this when they took the oath. They explicitly stated it.

They also knew the agency they joined had a flexible, ill-defined purpose, mostly revolving around the digital operations of the federal government. According to the still-active “Our Mission” page on the USDS website: “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.”

Once again, the eternal Office Space question applies: What would you say… you do here? The answer seems to be “whatever the White House tells us to do at any given moment.” USDS only came into being after the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, and since then, it’s just tackled whatever tech projects happened to matter to the administration in charge.

So, these staffers swore an oath to the Constitution and to serve under any president. They joined an agency with a deliberately vague mission. And now, they’re openly admitting that they never intended to honor that oath if the president’s agenda didn’t align with their personal beliefs.

In short: They lied when they took the oath, and now they want everyone to see them as heroes for it.

This entire saga is a nothingburger; Musk himself even commented on X, calling the resigning staffers “Dem political holdovers” who “would have been fired had they not resigned.” The resignation letter itself only reinforces that.

The AP reported that these former employees “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.” It went on to say that they complained about being questioned by “people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names,” and who “grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics.” These visitors were described as “young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.” [Emphasis mine.]

Let’s break that down. These supposedly “nonpartisan” former senior employees of Google and Amazon — who, coincidentally, all landed cushy jobs at an Obama-founded federal tech agency — were questioned by DOGE appointees who were (gasp) “young and seemed guided by ideology.” And the AP can’t seem to grasp why conservatives aren’t exactly weeping over their departure — or over the AP’s dwindling press access, for that matter.

The resigning staffers also whined about the recent layoff of 40 USDS employees, despite the fact that USDS is actively being restructured into DOGE, making those roles redundant.

“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,” their letter said.

“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.”

Sure. Because nothing says “security” like the USDS, an agency whose existence was never vital enough for anyone to notice — until they needed to frame themselves as indispensable victims. (Also, the timing didn’t help: this drama unfolded the same day Politico revealed that an IRS contractor exposed the tax information of 400,000 Americans. So much for protecting Americans’ data.)

If these roles were truly as essential as they now claim, they would have stayed to finish their work — oath or no oath. But because USDS is becoming DOGE and because someone dared to question whether their jobs were even necessary, they stormed out. As for that oath? Apparently, they had their fingers crossed the whole time.

In the end, this clumsy, overplayed attempt to paint DOGE as reckless only served to expose the outgoing employees as partisan operators who never planned to uphold the principles they swore to follow.