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Elon Musk has claimed the Department of Government Efficiency is “the most transparent organization in government ever.” But Merici Vinton, a federal worker who recently left her job at the government information technology office weeks after it was taken over by DOGE , told CNN in an interview she witnessed a “highly secretive” effort operating by “a different set of rules.” She described a wave of new staffers with limited knowledge of how federal agencies operate taking a bulldozer-like approach to shrinking the government — moves made with “a careless disregard for trying to understand how the work happens and what the rules and policies are.
” “A lot of government culture, love it or not, is about collaboration and consensus-building. That has not been the DOGE approach,” Vinton said. “They kind of do things their own way.
” In her first network interview since stepping down, Vinton offered an inside perspective on the events that unfolded at the US Digital Service. She watched as it turned into the staging ground for the administration’s push to drastically slash spending, reduce the federal workforce and remake the government around Trump’s priorities. The DOGE effort — which has led to massive layoffs , canceled contracts and at times wildly inaccurate claims about federal spending — has played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion of Trump’s second term.
Vinton, 44, started in 2021 at USDS, the executive branch office created under President Barack Obama to improve technology across the federal government. She worked on the temporary expansion of the child tax credit and was one of the architects of Direct File, which allows many Americans to file their taxes directly with the Internal Revenue Service. Vinton said she joined USDS to support rebuilding efforts after the Covid-19 pandemic.
She voluntarily left the government in March, roughly two months after the Trump administration transformed USDS into DOGE, allowing the initiative to occupy an existing government entity rather than creating a new one to run the cost-cutting operation. In the past, the office’s work, she said, has been “apolitical.” “I came to government to really build great experiences for people, to interact with government to get their benefits easier, to file their taxes easier, to get their tax refunds quicker,” Vinton said.
“That’s why I joined government. What I see DOGE is doing is, they’re actually breaking a lot of that down. They’re actually breaking those things apart.
” “I think it’s going to be incredibly hard to rebuild,” she said. DOGE officials did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. ‘Two separate teams’ Vinton said she and other employees learned that USDS would be turned into DOGE on Trump’s Inauguration Day, when the president signed an executive order rebranding the agency.
“We were all stunned,” Vinton said. “That evening, we received invites to interviews to meet our new colleagues.” She said DOGE representatives wearing temporary badges and identifying themselves by only their first names conducted 15-minute interviews with the agency’s 162 employees the next day.
Those questions included some unusual queries about “what makes you exceptional” and “who’s your favorite person” working at the agency. “It didn’t really feel like a serious set of questions,” she said. “You know, the work that we do can be really hard and really complex.
And these questions were ...
kind of random, didn’t really feel like they were going to meet a complexity of the work that we do.” Soon, she said, “it became very clear there (were) two separate teams” working at USDS: a DOGE team coordinating the sweeping government reduction mission and the residual USDS office, with the carryover employees struggling to keep alive what was left of existing IT improvement projects. “After we had these 15-minute interviews, we really didn’t know much about our futures.
We didn’t know if we were going to be the next fired, and we frankly all expected that. And so, for about a month and a half, we were rudderless. There was not a lot of leadership.
People were just trying to plod along and do their work,” she said. On the night of Valentine’s Day — less than a month after Trump took office — 43 of the agency’s employees received 8 p.m.
emails notifying them they were being fired, Vinton said. Less than two weeks later, another 21 employees resigned in protest. “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.
We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions,” those employees said in a resignation letter to Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles. Vinton said the atmosphere at the agency changed for its pre-DOGE employees. She described it as “a bit sad, a bit like a funeral.
” Vinton insisted her personal politics did not influence her observations. While Vinton started at USDS during the Biden administration and supports Democrats, her job is considered apolitical. Earlier in her life, she was a registered Republican, and she said she has voted for GOP and Democratic candidates.
‘A convenient container’ Vinton said she isn’t sure who is actually leading DOGE on a day-to-day basis. She said she never met Musk, and that Amy Gleason, the agency’s acting administrator , “made clear to us that she was overseeing more of the USDS legacy work and not calling the shots elsewhere.” Gleason started running USDS’ daily meetings after the mass purge of Vinton’s colleagues in mid-February, but the staff received no formal announcement that she was named acting administrator, even after the media reported the appointment based on White House sources.
Court filings have revealed Gleason is also working as a consultant at the Department of Health and Human Services — similar to several other DOGE affiliates who are working at multiple agencies at once — leaving judges to question who is actually directing the implementation of the DOGE agenda. Some of Vinton’s work was at the IRS, and she had a view into how the DOGE team was operating there. She observed the operatives embedded at that agency — who were often young and had no government experience — to be “highly empowered, as individuals, to make decisions and to determine their activities day-to-day.
” “I never understood who they, you know, were necessarily reporting into, other than ...
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent,” she said. “It was very unclear to me who was ultimately calling those shots.” But the benefits for DOGE in using USDS as its launchpad became apparent to Vinton.
“They could have access to the White House through our office space, they could have access to email accounts and ...
the ability to hire people,” Vinton said. “So, we very much felt just like a convenient container for DOGE.” Trump also moved USDS from its longtime home at the Office of Management and Budget — where it would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act and other government transparency laws — to the Executive Office of the President, which is much harder to penetrate from an oversight perspective.
Firing ‘your brand-new recruitment class’ Vinton was sharply critical of the Trump administration’s moves to lay off probationary employees — those hired most recently. Vinton said many of those employees were brought into the government because they had specific skills needed at the agencies. “A lot of those were highly technical people who we recruited, we brought in, because we were so excited about the technical skills that they brought to government.
It’s not efficient to fire, you know, your brand-new recruitment class, who brings the newest skills,” she said. Vinton said what worries her most is that Trump’s cuts across federal agencies will make it impossible for future administrations to rebuild the government’s ability to deliver the services Americans expect. “I want Americans to try to understand it and to believe it and to understand that what it is a wrecking ball, and that it’s not a scalpel,” Vinton said.
“It is going to dramatically decrease our government’s capacity to deliver services and benefits in the next few years.” “This is real, and it’s not in a bubble,” she said..
