Depositions offer insight into what Elon Musk’s group was up to. Members describe a club-like atmosphere in which they pushed for grant and contract cancellations across the government with little oversight.
Members of the U.S. DOGE Service spoke regularly over Signal, the encrypted chat service that can auto-delete messages. They were informally recruited by people they knew. And other government employees didn’t know who was “DOGE.”
When DOGE members were deposed in January as part of a lawsuit over cuts to grants awarded to the National Endowment for the Humanities, they described a vague network of similarly minded technologists and lawyers who had been tasked with a vast mandate to reduce federal spending. They also described a lack of structure that allowed them to operate with little oversight or understanding of what others might be doing. MORE