DOGE’s Smoke and Mirrors: How the Agency Deliberately Avoids Transparency

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a hatchet to the federal government, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs, shuttering entire government agencies, and slashing invaluable federal programs. Many of these decisions were reportedly made by inexperienced appointees with little to no background or expertise in government. 

The stakes could not be higher: Experts predict DOGE’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development alone will lead to 14 million additional deaths over the next five years. DOGE has also gained sweeping access to people’s sensitive personal and business data, fueling concerns about data privacy and the potential weaponization of sensitive information for political purposes. But as DOGE peruses Americans’ private information, Americans have been denied basic details about DOGE, from the names of DOGE staff to information about how an entity with such far-reaching power operates. 

In several responses to American Oversight’s Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, the Trump administration and DOGE have made false or misleading claims to dodge transparency and accountability, denying the existence of DOGE teams within certain agencies and advancing deceptive arguments about its structure and purpose. While American Oversight’s investigation has uncovered the names of several previously unidentified DOGE employees, the public still is in the dark about how the agency is carrying out its work. 

Shirking Transparency Through Confusion 

It’s been more than half a year since DOGE was established, but questions remain about who is even working for it. While Elon Musk’s threat to punish anyone who revealed the names of DOGE employees certainly didn’t help, there are deeper reasons behind this confusion. Several federal agencies have denied that they have dedicated DOGE teams, even when public reporting contradicts those claims. 

On President Trump’s first day back in office, he issued an executive order requiring all agencies to establish DOGE teams made up of at least four people. In response, American Oversight sent FOIA requests to dozens of agencies asking for records that would identify the people on these teams. But the agencies’ responses only sparked more questions about who exactly was working for DOGE. “[T]he CDC does not have a DOGE team, and therefore there are no documents pertaining to your request,” the agency said in response to our request. So did the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of the Interior.

But public reporting indicates that this is misleading at best. ProPublica and the New York Times have both identified one DOGE staffer connected to the CDC. ProPublica identified three DOGE employees connected to the Department of the Interior; the New York Times identified five, including two DOGE liaisons assigned to the department. In February, Politico reported that DOGE staff had visited the FDA, and DOGE itself has boasted of cuts it made to the agency.

Reporting from Wired and the Federal News Network point to similar discrepancies. At a press conference in March, Stephen Ehikian, the acting administrator of the General Services Administration, told reporters that GSA did not have a DOGE team. But Wired found that at least six DOGE workers have GSA email accounts and are listed in the staff directory. DOGE members also dominated a list, obtained by the Federal News Network, of individuals with C-suite access at GSA. 

But even with this obfuscation, other responses to our FOIA requests have shed some light on DOGE’s operations. The Department of Agriculture’s response identified three individuals working for DOGE whose names were previously unreported: Jeremy Lichtman, Timothy Ronan, and Samuel Berry. We also recently obtained resumes of several political appointees at the Department of Labor who are known DOGE staffers: Miles Collins, Marko Elez, and Aram Moghaddassi. We received the resume and SF-50 form, which provides notification of new personnel actions, of Gavin Hamrick, who may also be a DOGE staffer. These records offer more details on the individuals’ previous experience and connections as well as their pay.

It’s also difficult to track DOGE’s work because the ways its employees are hired has shifted several times. Many, like Elon Musk, were hired as “special government employees,” a category that permits them to skirt the ethics and financial disclosures required of most government workers. There is also no clear definition of what it means to work for DOGE because its members have worked in many different capacities, including being employed by the DOGE unit inside the White House, working for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, renamed the U.S. DOGE Service in Trump’s executive order), being detailed to or embedded at various agencies, and being hired as permanent employees of the agencies. Some, like billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have said they are helping DOGE — but it is not clear how. 

We also know from public reporting and court filings that DOGE has assigned some of its members to multiple agencies. For example, Marko Elez is an employee of the Department of Labor who is detailed to or has been tied to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and associated agencies, the Social Security Administration, and USDS. Aram Moghaddassi is a DOGE member associated not only with Labor, but with the Treasury, the SSA, the Transportation Security Administration, and several DHS sub-agencies. Additionally, a response we received from the Small Business Administration to a separate FOIA request lists Moghaddassi as a “Special Advisor” to Administrator Kelly Loeffler, indicating that Moghaddassi may have also done DOGE work at SBA.

Luke Farritor, Kyle Schutt, and Edward Coristine are employees of GSA who are detailed to HHS as well as USDS, and Coristine also has a Department of Homeland Security email address. The fact that these individuals are officially employed by agencies distinct from DOGE and detailed to multiple agencies to conduct DOGE’s work makes it difficult to track DOGE’s actions and staffers, making it easier for DOGE to conceal important details. The overlapping assignments also indicate that there is a core DOGE team carrying out a central mission. 

Making False Arguments About DOGE’s Agency Status

Those aren’t the only ways DOGE is hiding its actions. In an apparent attempt to avoid FOIA and other federal records laws, Trump moved USDS out of the Office of Management and Budget (which is subject to FOIA) to make DOGE a free-standing unit within the Executive Office of the President. That structural manipulation has led the administration to claim — despite all the evidence of the extent of DOGE’s real-world activities — that DOGE’s purpose is merely to advise and assist the president, and that it does not exercise any independent authority. Thus, it claims that DOGE is not an agency and its records are therefore subject to the Presidential Records Act instead of FOIA or the Federal Records Act — meaning records about its current and ongoing impact could be shielded from the public until at least 2034. 

American Oversight has witnessed DOGE deploy these claims to keep information about its work hidden. In February, after DOGE failed to turn over records we requested, we filed a first-of-its-kind FOIA lawsuit against the agency. In April, we sued DOGE again, this time alleging that its use of ephemeral messaging platforms like Signal violated the Federal Records Act and opened the door for important government records to be permanently destroyed. 

In filings in both of these lawsuits, the government’s attorneys have claimed that DOGE is not an agency. As we’ve previously written, DOGE’s sweeping power and range of influence shows that DOGE is doing far more than simply advising and assisting the president. The various executive orders that created DOGE as well as DOGE’s documented track record of making wide-ranging decisions to upend the executive branch demonstrate that the agency wields substantial power independent from the president — and therefore should be held accountable through FOIA and the FRA.

These laws are essential tools to bring to light what DOGE wants to hide. FOIA requires federal agencies to make records available to the public and bars the destruction of records requested through FOIA. The FRA requires agencies to preserve records — including digital communications — that the agency creates or receives. Records that show who made a decision and why it was made are absolutely essential for our ability to hold leaders accountable for their actions, especially when they cause harm. 

On Wednesday, American Oversight sued more than 20 federal agencies for failing to release records identifying the names and roles of individuals serving on agency DOGE teams. Although multiple agencies have acknowledged our FOIA requests, the vast majority have failed to comply with their FOIA obligation to notify us of what records will be produced, nor have they produced a single responsive record.

Elon Musk once claimed that DOGE was “the most transparent organization in government ever.” Our experience shows the opposite: DOGE is shape-shifting and tiptoeing behind closed doors to thwart efforts to learn more about its consequential and destructive actions. DOGE wants to have its cake and eat it, too: At the same time it claims to be a toothless non-agency so as to evade transparency laws, it is wielding its substantial power to take consequential and destructive action. And by keeping the public in the dark about basic things like who it employs and who is working on its behalf, it is much harder to track DOGE.

But these evasive and illegal tactics cannot fully bury the truth. We’re only beginning to see the impact of DOGE’s massive cuts; Americans deserve to know why these decisions were made — and who was in the room.