Dozens quit Elon Musk's DOGE citing security risks over US data.

 Extract from ABC News

• By Ahmed Yussuf

• Topic:World Politics

15 hours ago

Elon Musk has dismissed the resignation of dozens of DOGE staffers who cited security concerns saying they were "Dem political holdovers". (AP: Alex Brandon)

In short:

About 21 civil servants from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency have resigned saying they will not use their skills to jeopardise the sensitive data of Americans.

It comes as US media has reported DOGE was using AI to determine which government workers were critical.

Mr Musk has described the mass resignation from his department as "fake news", and that staff who quit "would have been fired had they not resigned."

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Elon Musk's DOGE has reportedly used AI to pick and choose which government jobs are necessary as dozens of the department's employees resign.

About 21 civil service employees from the US government department of efficiency resigned saying they refuse to use their technical expertise to "dismantle critical public services."

In a joint resignation letter, the 21 DOGE 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.

It comes as MSNBC has reported that responses to Mr Musk directed email to government employees over the weekend to detail what they accomplished over the week will be fed into an artificial intelligence system to decide if those jobs are needed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was dismissive of the resignations.

"Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years," Ms Leavitt said in a statement.

Mr Musk posted on his social media site X that the story was "fake news", suggesting the staffers were "Dem political holdovers" who "would have been fired had they not resigned".

Resigning employees warn of potential for security risks

The DOGE employees who quit also warned that many of those enlisted by Mr Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The staffers who resigned had worked for the United States Digital Service, but said their duties were being integrated into DOGE.

"We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardise Americans' sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services," they wrote.

"We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimise DOGE's actions."

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As Elon Musk and the DOGE get to work, there is concern that their slash-and-burn approach will have unwanted consequences: just ask Megan, a USAID employee who got one of the billionaire's dreaded emails.

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.

According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors' badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled them about their qualifications and politics.

Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by the ideology and fandom of Mr Musk.

"Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability," the staffers wrote in their letter.

"This process created significant security risks."

Elon Musk is shaping US bureaucracy, expert says

It has now emerged that nearly 40 per cent of the federal contracts the Trump administration claims to have cancelled as part of its signature cost-cutting program were not expected to save the government any money, the administration's data shows.

DOGE published an updated list of nearly 2,300 contracts that government agencies had terminated in recent weeks and more than one-third, 794 in all, were expected to yield no savings, according to its "Wall of Receipts".

That's usually because the total value of the contracts has already been fully obligated, which means the government has a legal requirement to spend the funds for the goods or services it purchased and in many cases has already done so.

Dr John Hart, the former head of Australian National University's political science department, said the resignations were the most recent instalment of the "chaos" created in the US government.

"His task of reducing the size of the American government. It raises significant questions about how far outsiders can make these vital decisions about jobs and the shape of the American bureaucracy," he said.

"It raises the whole question about the security of sensitive data that the American government holds and at the moment, restricts."

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Dr Hart was concerned that civil service was being politicised, saying an ideologue might not necessarily match the public good.

"A lot of government depends not on politicians making decisions [but] a trained qualified expert public service carrying out those decisions, implementing those decisions,"

he said.

"That is a problem when you introduce what seems to be, in the case of Elon Musk, a bunch of young, fairly inexperienced individuals that have been recruited from it seems his own organisations with no training in government."

The civil service played an important role in any democratic government, and members of the bureaucracy needed to have a certain degree of knowledge and expertise to roll-out policy, Dr Hart added.

"That doesn't seem to exist at the moment," he said.

AI reportedly used to find which government jobs are critical

Dr Jonathan Kummerfeld from the University of Sydney specialises in Natural Language Processing with a focus on systems for collaboration between people and AI models.

He weighed in on the MSNBC report that civil servants' responses to the "what did you do last week" email would be fed into an AI system to determine if someone's work was mission critical.

"The biggest risk is basically it's going to make mistakes, and those mistakes partly come from biases in the model that are hard to pin down and hard to understand,"

Dr Kummerfield said.

"So when they give whatever information they're collecting to the model, they also give it a prompt saying, please make a decision, and they give it some information.

"The way you write that is going to really influence the decisions it makes."

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There has been research published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that shows biases within artificial intelligence have the potential to amplify our own biases.

"So for example, if one person writes who is a native English speaker, and someone else who writes who English is their second language," he said.

"Maybe they phrase things in a slightly unusual or different way, or they use words that are going to be interpreted differently, that could impact its decision unfairly."

There are real potential benefits with AI, Dr Kummerfield said, but it's about how the technology was applied, and testing was critical.

To mitigate those risks organisations from governments to private companies needed to think carefully, Dr Kummerfield said.

"So it's not automatically a bad idea, but if it's rushed into implementation and it's treated as a way of just replacing people and saving money, that has risks," he said.

Dr Kummerfield said it was that likely other organisations were trying to use AI in this way.

"So grappling with the challenges and the risks it presents is an important thing to do now, because there are a lot of them that will fly under the radar and we will only discover the consequences down the line," he said.

ABC/AP