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A DOGE Origin Story: How Barack Obama Laid The Groundwork For Elon Musk
Democrats thought they could shutter the Department of Government Efficiency before it even started, filing lawsuits that said its anticipated structure as an outside advisory committee was illegal. But when Inauguration Day rolled around, the reality was, for them, much worse: DOGE would be an official entity with hundreds of paid staff, authorized to hire outsiders with little vetting, and able to engage in openly ideological activity.
And Democrats had only themselves to blame.
DOGE took over the U.S. Digital Service, a 300-person technology office President Barack Obama set up inside the Executive Office of the President in 2014 to fix his beleaguered HealthCare.gov. Bureaucrats had bungled the site, so USDS sought out Silicon Valley innovators, and was authorized to circumvent federal hiring procedures to get them. Hiring young people from the tech world and putting them together to work for Obama, unmoored from the stuffy rules of a typical government building, led to an environment of overt left-wing advocacy.
Obama designed it that way, making the USDS administrator, its top employee, a political appointee. When Donald Trump took over in 2017, he didn’t attempt to turn the tables. Instead, he turned the other cheek. He reclassified USDS’s top job as a career position, not a political one, signaling that he trusted the employees to simply carry out the unglamorous job of fixing government IT.
But USDS staff abused that trust, using it, incredibly, to run left-wing activism from inside Trump’s first White House. During his first term, it hired multiple people who had worked in the porn industry, one who’d worked in a gender studies department, and a transgender activist. USDS leadership subjected staff to memos lecturing them on “toxic masculinity” while devoting significant effort to DEI hiring, a Daily Wire review found.
Trump wasn’t rewarded for his attempt to give federal employees autonomy. Democrats have continued to claim that he was trying to “politicize” the federal workforce. And when Joe Biden won the presidency, he didn’t even make a pretense of maintaining the nonpartisan nature: He promptly changed the top role back to political appointment, and even granted his appointee waivers exempting her from ethics rules.
USDS is a case study for why Trump’s second term is being approached with a more skeptical and hard-knuckled approach.
The irony is that Democrats had built a ticking time bomb. Then federal employees destroyed any pretense that, if left to their own devices, they would be “apolitical” instead of left-wing. Happening in over-the-top fashion right underneath Trump’s nose, it was an outrageous betrayal that no president would forgive or forget.
USDS is a case study in why Trump and his team are taking a more skeptical, hard-knuckled approach to the president’s second term. Trump learned that kindness would be exploited as weakness. Democrats and federal employees had set the table, and now Elon Musk is serving revenge that’s been chilling for four years.
***
A professional bio describes Clare Bayley as a “sex and technology expert” for whom “both technology and sexual media have been passions of hers since she hit puberty.” Bayley “founded and runs The Nectarine Project, a non-profit trying to make big tech more sex positive,” the bio notes.
Bayley worked for MIT’s Women’s & Gender Studies Department, then for the hardcore pornography website Kink.com. She’d later work for “Lesbians Who Tech & Allies :: Queer. Inclusive. Badass,” according to her LinkedIn. But the job she held in between was perhaps the oddest: Beginning in 2018, she worked for Donald Trump’s Executive Office of the President.
It wasn’t that the Trump administration hired her, per se. To the people at USDS, Trump wasn’t president at all. They made Bayley a high-level manager. In September 2019, she wrote a memo to staff from her eop.gov address:
“I was at a conference in Boston last week and the opening keynote was the most Machiavellian, toxic-masculinity-focused approach to the project mindset I’ve ever seen. Let’s talk about it. This is a chance for us to vent about some of the biases we’ve seen in our careers, especially those expressed as ‘career advice,’ and talk about what we can do in our own community to guard against/dig out similar things. Please note, white straight cis men are welcome at this meeting, but please spend most of your time actively listening.”
The email, and Bayley, were typical of USDS’s culture. Harlan Lieberman-Berg (“he/him”) came from the porn world, as the “founder of AdvertiSin, an online-advertising company bringing modern real-time bidding technology to the adult entertainment industry.” USDS hired him in 2017, and he worked there until 2020 as “advisor to several acquisition efforts with contract values totaling over $10 billion,” according to his LinkedIn.
Woodhull Freedom Foundation
Amy Paris was hired by the Trump USDS in May 2020, making him one of the highest-ranking transgender-identifying people in government. He used his position to push for airport screenings geared towards transgenders, and non-gendered passports.
19th News
Natalie Moore, a former Peace Corps member, worked at the Trump USDS through September 2018, before going on to NPR and the Biden for President campaign and Biden’s 2020 transition team. Then she came back to USDS, where she expanded food stamp uptake and “improved U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), resulting in the highest refugee arrival numbers in the last three decades,” according to her LinkedIn, which says she remains a USDS employee to this day.
A former employee told The Daily Wire, on condition of anonymity, that USDS employees “actively would not help any tech or program that had to do with Trump’s immigration policies. They would stall, say we don’t have the resources. They’re smart and savvy and leverage their knowledge of federal operations to stall reforms. The worst ones are the ones smart enough to not expose themselves overtly.”
“When [the Trump administration] first came in they thought ‘it’s tech, they’ll do their jobs, how bad could it be?’ They have learned over the last years about how diabolically malicious they are,” the employee said.
***
The first Trump administration put Matt Cutts, a former Google engineer and Democratic National Committee donor, in charge of USDS. In April 2021, USDS announced “The Next Chapter for USDS: Matt Cutts (he/him), Administrator of the U.S. Digital Service.” Cutts did little to ensure that the office was advancing Trump’s policies, or at least not actively undermining them, according to the former staffer. Jared Kushner had announced a plan to use USDS as part of an “Office of American Innovation,” but no one heard much about the innovation office after that, and USDS pretty much behaved as if Trump had never been elected.
Cutts’ deputy was Edward Hartwig “(he/him)”, a former public defender who was originally hired by the Obama administration, and who the Biden administration promoted to the top job after Cutts left.
During the Trump administration, significant effort was spent attempting to hire staff using DEI criteria. It had four recruiters on staff, none of whom were white. In 2019, it sponsored a conference called AfroTech, aimed at hiring black web developers.
In 2018, a panel at a Lesbians Who Tech conference consisted solely of USDS employees, including Director of Design Amanda Miklik, who moonlights as a “Kink Aware Professional.” Miklik offers life coaching as a “kink-aware, queer, genderqueer person. I specialize in body liberation/body justice, anti-racism for white folks.”
Product Manager Kasia Chmielinski (“they/them”), who now “builds tools to mitigate bias in artificial intelligence,” was also on the panel. It was moderated by USDS Director of Strategy/Operations Julie Meloni, who previously worked at a “4-person queer women-owned & operated multimedia company” and gravitated towards USDS not because it mirrored Silicon Valley, but because it didn’t, having more diversity.
USDS is supposed to hire for limited two- or four-year terms. In practice, people worked in a high-level but unusually partisan environment, then used the contacts they made to embed in the permanent workforce across government agencies. Paris, for example, now works for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Dana Chisell is in a high-level role at the Department of Homeland Security after her Biden USDS term. USDS alum Michael Boyce, whose career has focused on refugee programs, is the head of DHS’s AI Corps.
Others may have cashed in on those connections as government contractors. Former USDS deputy administrator Hartwig, porn entrepreneur Lieberman-Berg, and Kat Jurick (who worked for USDS throughout Trump’s first term) now comprise a contracting firm called Service Design Collective, which bills itself as a “woman owned small business” where “pronouns matter.”
USDS wrote a report saying that the database tracking organ donors needed to be replaced. Ankit Mathur worked at USDS from April 2022 until March 2024 when he took a job at the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the database. That same month, HHS awarded Service Design Collective a $1.4 million contract to work on the Organ Procurement Transplant Network.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, the United Network for Organ Sharing said it was “following all applicable post-employment legal and ethical requirements for anyone previously employed by the federal government.” Service Design Collective did not respond to a request for comment.
Current and former USDS staff keep in touch via an email group. It’s taken for granted that they’re all Democrats who want to stop Trump. Paris seemed to believe his second inauguration meant end times were near. “The time to start backing up websites was yesterday,” he wrote.
Jordan Kasper, a Trump USDS alum now working for DHS, wrote that it would be “illegal for the administration to simply [code] them en masse. Of course that wouldn’t necessarily stop them.”
USDS employees seem to have realized that Trump learned from his first experience with them and isn’t likely to tolerate insurrection.
Meloni, who moderated the Lesbians Who Tech panel of USDS employees, wrote on LinkedIn last month that back in 2017, she and other employees wondered “how do we go on?”
“But this one is hitting much differently,” she wrote of what she called the “DOGE BS.”
“It’s pain.”
Related: ‘Triggered’ No More: Federal Tech Arm Deletes ‘Inclusion Bot’ After Musk Takeover
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