'Either we die quickly or slowly': Pentagon's 'SWAT team of nerds' resigns over clashes with Musk's DOGE
Almost every staffer at the DDS will resign in the coming month, the program’s director Jennifer Hay and three other current members of the office said. WORLD
Officials at the US Defense Digital Service (DDS), the Pentagon's elite tech unit, are resigning over the next month after clashing with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Almost every staffer at the DDS will resign in the coming month, the program’s director Jennifer Hay and three other current members of the office said.
“The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said, according to a Politico report. She is planning to leave by May 1.
The unit, dubbed as the Pentagon's "SWAT team of nerds", was created in 2015, with an aim to modernise defence operations with fast tech fixes and digital tools for the military.
It has also built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid, drone detection technologies and more.
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Also, DDS was one of the department's earlier efforts to inject Silicon Valley ethos into its massive bureaucracy.
Moreover, the resignations by the team will effectively shut down the decade-old program after the end of April.
Along with Hay, eleven other employees are planning to take Trump's deferred resignation package by then. The two remaining staffers are also leaving.
Hay said her staff initially expected to be part of Musk’s efforts to automate the Pentagon’s operations and adopt AI.
“The reason we stuck it out as long as we have is that we thought we were going to be called in,” said Hay.
However, instead of this, they were sidelined by DOGE's efforts.
One former senior Pentagon official, on the condition of anonymity, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive.
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“They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said.
Meanwhile, not just DDS, the US Digital Service, which helped the government modernise its technology and attract tech talent, has now been subsumed by DOGE.
Moreover, a program called 18F, a technology unit within the GSA, was also eliminated by DOGE.
(With inputs from agencies)
