In a surprising turn of events, a group of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees have chosen to resign, claiming that their duties violate the Constitution.
However, their resignation letter reveals an unexpected admission, suggesting that their initial oath to the Constitution may not have been as sincere as it appeared.
According to Western Journal, the mass resignation of the DOGE staff has been widely covered by the media, with the Associated Press (AP) reporting that over 20 civil service employees resigned from the department, which is overseen by billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk. The employees, including engineers, data scientists, designers, and product managers, stated that they were refusing to use their technical expertise to "dismantle critical public services."
The AP further noted that this mass resignation is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president's tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. However, it is important to understand the context in which DOGE was established.
The department was carved out of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a largely ineffective government agency established under the Obama administration. The Trump administration's decision to repurpose the USDS into DOGE was a strategic move, as it meant that DOGE already existed and was therefore subject to fewer obstacles to its continued existence.
The AP report also mentioned that the resigning staffers had previously worked for the USDS, but their duties were being integrated into DOGE. However, it failed to clarify that the USDS is now DOGE, and is in the process of being reorganized. This means that former USDS bureaucrats are still present, and if they cannot actively undermine DOGE or continue to collect paychecks without contributing significantly, they might as well resign.
In their collective resignation email, the staffers wrote, "We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments."
This statement implies that they were not sincere in their oath to serve regardless of the administration in power. Their job, as civil servants, was to serve no matter who the president was. They knew that when they took the oath. They say that.
The USDS was established primarily to address the disastrous roll-out of Healthcare.gov, the infamous Obamacare portal. Since then, it has mostly performed whatever digital work suited the administration in charge. The resigning employees were aware of this when they took their oath. However, they now admit that they were not sincere in their commitment if they were asked to serve under a president whose directives they disagreed with.
Musk himself noted that the resigning staffers were "Dem political holdovers" that "would have been fired had they not resigned." The AP report continued to state that these employees, who previously held senior roles at tech companies like Google and Amazon, joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service. However, they were outraged over the fact that 40 staffers in the USDS were laid off earlier in the month, despite the fact that the USDS is being transformed into DOGE.
The resigning employees claimed that their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on services like Social Security, veterans' services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, and student aid every day. They argued that the sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American data less safe.
However, if these services were indeed so vital, these individuals would have stayed on to complete the tasks they swore to do. Instead, they chose to resign because they disagreed with the transformation of the USDS into DOGE and the scrutiny of government bloat.
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