DOGE director Elon Musk has shut out senior government workers and seized control of key workflows in the Office of Personnel Management, causing major security concerns, a source told Reuters.
The Office of Personnel Management functions as the government’s human resources agency, managing policies, payments, recruitment, and labor relations.
Government aides working for the billionaire Tesla CEO and Trump sidekick have reportedly taken over the office’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration database, which contains the personal data of millions of federal employees, two agency officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
Musk has suggested that he could cut “at least $2 trillion” from U.S. government spending by eliminating “waste” and redundancy. President Donald Trump has also pledged to shrink the government, offering buyouts to all federal employees who opt to leave their jobs by Feb. 6.
The merits of such an offering have been called into question by legal experts. As one attorney told NPR, the offer is “not based on any law or regulation or anything really other than an idea they cooked up to get federal employees out of the government.”
But that hasn’t stopped Trump administration officials from moving to freeze out employees, with some Office of Personnel Management workers fearing Musk is aiming to replace them with Trump loyalists.
