Elon Musk’s Midnight Takeover 

Chip Somodevilla/Pool/CNP/Zuma

Much like a gremlin fed after midnight, Elon Musk is staying up late and causing mayhem. As Musk-backed cuts and changes continue to spread across federal agencies, employees have found that many of the bizarre communications they’re receiving, as well as the unusual diktats transforming their workplaces in the name of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, are happening late at night and on weekends. 

On Sunday night, for instance, federal workers received another unusual email encouraging them to quit their jobs and take a “deferred resignation” in which they will supposedly be paid through September 30 while not working. The original message, sent January 28 and titled “A Fork in the Road,” generated intense backlash from federal workers and warnings from union leaders that the offer’s terms and legality were on shaky ground. The follow-up email, formatted as a Q&A and unsigned like the original, assured workers the offer was legitimate. (“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” one passage read, about whether workers can get second jobs during the deferred resignation period. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)

Before President Donald Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE, it was “very unusual” to receive such important communications outside of normal working hours, one federal employee said, echoing several others. “Avoiding office hours at all costs, it seems.”

On Monday morning, meanwhile, workers discovered that a portion of the General Services Administration (GSA) office in Washington, DC, had suddenly been closed off; federal workers say they suspect it’s being occupied by DOGE personnel. They tell Mother Jones that an administrative suite of the GSA, along with bathrooms and a lunchroom, are now inaccessible to staff who aren’t on an “access list” and security is keeping others out. A GSA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment before publication. 

Musk himself reportedly boasted to friends that he’d been sleeping at the DOGE offices in DC, according to Wired, which are based out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House. On Sunday night, he held a conversation on X’s Spaces at midnight to answer questions about DOGE, alongside Republican Sens. Joni Ernst and Mike Lee and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who was once named as DOGE’s co-chair before being unsubtly phased out. It was a meandering conversation, with Musk holding forth about how he would curb inflation by taking “a trillion dollars out of the deficit” in the next year, a feat he’d carry out by making massive cuts to government programs he deems to be wasteful. (He also predicted that in order to preserve their benefits, unscrupulous operators will claim to be “single mothers” whose benefits are being cut. Instead, Musk said, they actually are fraudsters operating a vast international criminal network. ) 

Beyond the bizarre hours and unusual communiqués, federal employees also are  objecting to the extreme secrecy with which people affiliated with DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management have carried out ostensible government functions. At the GSA, as Mother Jones has previously reported, officials affiliated with Musk and DOGE requested that employees submit to “code review”—demonstrating computer code they’ve written and defending its efficiency and usefulness—something that also happened when Musk took over Twitter. GSA employees have been asked to submit to these code reviews without knowing the full names of these individuals. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla employee who’s now directing the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, defended the move in internal communications, while also admitting the people conducting the reviews are not official GSA employees at the moment. 

“The folks conducting the calls are advisers,” he wrote to employees. “They are in progress [sic] of onboarding to GSA.” When pressed by employees about why they were being asked to do code reviews with people who would not divulge their full names, he replied: “Agreed on it being weird and uncomfortable. The key issue is that we’ve already had some media attention on the process I’m using to understand the tech and the team—trying to protect these folks that are taking the time to do this for me.” In other words, back then, Shedd appeared to be trying to shield his effort, and the people involved in it, from media scrutiny by trying to hide their identities, a level of anonymity that government employees are not usually provided.

Despite the attempted secrecy, Wired has identified some of the young engineers working for Musk’s DOGE, whom they describe as having little or no experience in government; indeed, some of them appear to be fresh out of college. This crew of Musk acolytes, according to the publication, include Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. The majority of the men appear to have recently deleted their LinkedIn profiles and locked down other social media. 

Musk has suggested that individuals and media outlets that identify the DOGE engineers are, in his words, “guilty of a crime.” Ed Martin Jr., the interim US attorney for DC, has made it clear that he’s aligning himself with Musk, writing in an open letter on X, “we will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” The statement didn’t come with any concrete allegations of criminal behavior, and identifying government employees by name would not under normal circumstances be considered a crime. 

Other strange after-hours occurrences tread the line between outrage and black comedy, federal employees say. A worker at an intelligence agency says unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, a target of a Trump executive order. That included a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, that read, “Be kind to everyone.”