The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives have caused technological chaos for both individuals interacting with government agencies and the people inside of them, despite DOGE leader Elon Musk touting the effort as Silicon Valley-style “tech support” for the federal government.
Part of the difficulty has come as thousands of government employees, including ones hired for entirely remote roles, have been ordered back to work at actual government offices.
The influx of personnel has strained government tech systems, employees of the Department of Agriculture and the IRS told WIRED.
“We are getting hammered with RTO tickets,” one employee said, using an acronym for return to office. “We do not have the IT infrastructure to support this massive RTO mandate.”
Workers have “no soap, toilet paper, or paper towels anywhere in the building. Their water machine is broken. Many cannot get on local area networks, and the Wi-Fi keeps going down,” an IRS employee added in an interview with the magazine.
Tech issues have also dogged public-facing agencies like the Social Security Administration, which is reportedly looking to make further cuts on top of 7,000 people who are already in the process of being removed or offered retirement and buyouts.
Over the previous week, websites associated with Social Security have repeatedly crashed, sometimes for nearly an entire day, after DOGE implemented a new fraud-check system without testing it on large volumes of users, according to The Washington Post.
Separately, more than 7 million people on the Supplemental Security Income program got a misleading message that they were “currently not receiving payments,” when they still in fact were, according to an email obtained by the newspaper.
Another DOGE initiative, which next week will begin requiring users to authenticate their identities online, has prompted further strain on the agency’s servers.
“We’re just spiking like crazy,” a senior official told The Post. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”
At least 800 of the 3,000 Social Security workers left in the division managing the agency’s databases could face impending layoffs, according to The Post.
Social Security has been a consistent focus of Musk, who has frequently and inaccurately claimed that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” sending millions of dead people checks.
(Less than one percent of the agency’s payments between 2015 and 2022 were improper, according to a 2024 inspector general report.)
