According to two people with knowledge of the situation, Trump administration officials have informed certain U.S. government workers that Elon Musk’s DOGE team of technologists is using artificial intelligence to monitor the communications of at least one federal agency in hostile ways against President Donald Trump and his agenda.
Even if a large portion of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is still secret, the surveillance would be a remarkable use of technology to spot signs of alleged disloyalty in a workforce already being upended by widespread layoffs and drastic cost-cutting measures.
Another source with firsthand knowledge of the situation said that the DOGE team is also communicating via the Signal app, which may violate federal record-keeping regulations because messages can be configured to expire after a certain amount of time. According to that individual, they have “heavily” used Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, a potential competitor of ChatGPT, in their efforts to cut the federal government. Exactly how Grok was being used was unknown to Reuters.
The use of AI and Signal exacerbates worries among government ethicists and cybersecurity experts that DOGE is not being transparent and that the Trump administration or billionaire Musk may use the data collected by AI to target political targets or further their own agendas.
After senior Trump administration officials were criticized last month for inadvertently including a journalist in a group chat regarding high-level military planning in Yemen, Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said DOGE’s use of privacy-focused Signal adds to growing concerns over data security practices.
They are breaking the law, she said, if they are utilizing Signal and not backing up all of their messages to federal files.
The unconventional use of AI and other technology in federal government operations is highlighted in interviews with around 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s activities and an analysis of hundreds of pages of court records from lawsuits contesting DOGE’s data access.
For example, Trump appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency informed some managers that Musk’s team is using AI to monitor employees, including searching for words deemed unfavorable to Trump or Musk, according to the two sources.
The Trump administration has placed a great deal of emphasis on the EPA, which protects the environment by enforcing regulations like the Clean Air Act. It has let off about 600 workers since January and announced plans to cut 65% of its budget, which may necessitate additional staffing cuts.
According to two people familiar with the matter, DOGE was utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor communication apps and software, such as Microsoft Teams, which is commonly used for virtual conversations and chats, and managers were informed by Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA positions. A third individual with knowledge of the EPA told that they are searching for language that is anti-Trump or anti-Musk. Reuters was unable to verify on its own whether the AI was being used.
Those whose work did not fit the administration’s purpose will be targeted by DOGE, according to the first two sources citing Trump aides. One of the people who spoke cautioned, “Be careful what you say, what you type, and what you do.”
A comment request was not answered by the EPA.
Musk has portrayed DOGE as a tech-driven initiative aimed at reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in the US federal government. He stated that the objective was to reduce spending by $1 trillion, or 15% of the annual budget of the United States.
The need to update the U.S. government’s outdated computer systems is widely acknowledged. However, Trump and Musk are removing partisan public officials from the government and replacing them with loyalists who would ignore corruption, according to Democrats. DOGE’s actions are also being criticized by several Republicans and independents.
The ethics expert, Clark, expressed concern about the potential monitoring. She claimed that it “sounds like an abuse of government power to suppress or deter speech that the president of the United States doesn’t like.”
According to someone with direct knowledge of Musk’s remarks, he implied last year, before to Trump’s election, that AI might be utilized to replace government employees. “The idea was to use government data to create the most dynamic AI system ever,” the individual explained, adding that AI would then “do the work.”
Teaching AI systems to automate some of the labor currently performed by federal personnel would be a challenging task.
As a special government employee, Musk is banned by ethics laws from participating in government operations that benefit him or his enterprises.
TRANSPARENCY QUESTIONS
In addition to using Signal, some DOGE employees are avoiding other vetting protocols and chains of custody for official government documents by working simultaneously in Google Docs rather than circulating single copies of drafts, according to a source briefed by a government official.
“There are multiple people editing things at the same time in one Google Doc,” the source explained, referring to the online word processing program. According to the insider, this was one of the reasons DOGE was able to operate so swiftly.
Since DOGE is a division of the Executive Office of the President, the Trump administration has maintained that it is exempt from laws granting the public access to records created by government organizations.
The group was ordered by a federal judge on March 10 to begin providing data to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog that had sued to get DOGE materials under federal freedom of information rules, citing DOGE’s “unusual secrecy,” including its use of Signal. No records had been turned over as of Monday, according to the watchdog.
In court battles contesting Musk’s (the richest man in the world) right to restructure the federal government, allegations have surfaced that DOGE is purposefully working in secrecy as he integrates his young DOGE team of engineers and aides deep within the government’s digital infrastructure.
Interviews and court documents reveal that DOGE employees have significantly tightened administrative controls at several agencies, making major operational changes without informing staffers.
According to court filings, Musk’s team shut down the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency, in late January, denying its employees access to a database that contained the private information of tens of millions of federal employees, both past and present. OPM is central to the administration’s plan to reduce the size of the government, issuing directives that are viewed as blueprints for reducing the civil service.
Two sources with knowledge of the situation said that since late January, over 100 OPM tech employees have been unable to access the cloud where important apps are kept.
According to the sources, access is still restricted to just two individuals: a career staffer and Greg Hogan, a political appointee who had employed at an AI startup and is currently OPM’s top information officer. A request for comment from Hogan was not answered.
