Elon Musk loves wearing his TECH SUPPORT T-shirt in the White House. He wore it to his Oval Office interview; he wore it to his first Cabinet meeting. “I actually just call myself Humble Tech Support here,” Musk told heads of departments whose computer systems he’d already accessed.
Acting like the IT guy: this wasn’t really Musk trying to be cute, or somehow downplaying all the chaos his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had unleashed in its first month of existence. It’s a stark reminder of how he had secured, so fast, enough power to terrorize the federal government from within: literally, using nothing but the access provided by the White House’s IT department.
Which, in all probability like your company’s tech team, has a “god mode” level of access to many key computer systems. The kind of access that could do a lot of damage at any organization anywhere in our hyperconnected world, let alone inside the two million employee-strong U.S. government.
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If we learn anything from what DOGE has done and what DOGE still has the power to do, experts say, it’s this: If the IT department wants to unleash hell and the CEO doesn’t want to stop them, the IT department unleashes hell — no matter how humble they claim to be.
“The best analogy might be Nick Burns the computer guy, but make him evil,” says Kurtis Minder, founder of GroupSense, a threat intelligence business. Minder specializes in cyber espionage and ransom negotiations with corporate cybercriminals.
Burns, played by Jimmy Fallon on SNL, was an obnoxious tech support guy who bellowed at employees to move away from their computers — a character who may seem much less funny in the age of Musk.
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For example, “an IT person with any kind of administrative computer privileges would absolutely be able to mess with payroll in any number of ways,” Minder says — such as going into payment system software and, uh, zeroing out your paycheck. It would be “trivial” for an IT guy to install keylogger software that literally let him spy on everything employees typed on a company machine.
And if an IT guy wanted to effectively “shadow fire” someone, perhaps forcing them out by cutting access to any internal software or system that let them their job? “Absolutely,” Minder says. The IT guy could “sort of disappear them.”
What is DOGE doing next?
As concerned as he is by DOGE flexing its IT muscle, Minder is — like all the experts we spoke to for this article — far more concerned with what could happen now because of its rampage through a patchwork of government computer systems.
“Going in and saying we’re going to re-architect all these systems when we haven’t bothered to to assess and secure the ones that exist … is bad,” Minder says, struggling for words. And that’s about as far as he goes with speculation.
“What should be a priority: let’s digitally secure the country. Then let’s talk about how we can make things more efficient!” The mild-mannered Minder takes note of his own tone, but he means it: “This is the stuff I live every day, and it makes me angry.”
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So if the country is less digitally secure under DOGE — and to be clear, with foreign actors now able to hack the U.S. government via the insecure laptops of Musk’s Humble Tech Support team such as the 19-year-old known as Big Balls, that’s what experts agrees it is — what’s the worst that can happen?
After all, as Minder says, he sees bad actors “on the dark web selling stolen U.S. government classified information every day, so we’re already losing that battle.”
But the “neutering” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where Musk has embedded another of his 19-year-old IT guys, who is also a graduate of a cybercriminal social network known as the Corn, according to this veteran reporter’s expose — this, for Minder, accelerates the whole crisis.
“The most terrifying [outcome] is that we regress even further, that we don’t pay attention to what I believe is a major national security issue,” Minder says. Instead of working to plug existing leaks, in other words, the DOGE-riddled government becomes a sieve — a very lucrative one for the Rivages of the world.
Can anything be done to stop the work of a leaky IT guy? Minder is pessimistic. Musk has his team firmly in control of computer systems at the Office of Personnel and Management, which in corporate terms would mean that the IT department basically runs the HR department. “I don’t know if any guardrails are left” inside the U.S. government, Minder says. Musk’s DOGE “tested the fences, and they found out nobody cares about them.”
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Well, not nobody, exactly — but those that do care are demoralized and heading for the exits, says Dr. Richard Forno, Assistant Director of the UMBC Cybersecurity Institute. Forno is as much of a Washington D.C. veteran as you’ll find in this area; his 20-year career includes building the first cybersecurity programs for the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Among his friends and contractors in the government, “There is panic about the security of federal systems,” Forno says. “People are basically saying, well, why am I even bothering with this any more? What’s the point in fighting the good fight? They’re starting to look for other jobs. They’re fed up.”
This is one sense in which DOGE is worse than the average company IT department — because your IT guys probably have more cybersecurity training than Musk’s team. “They may be brilliant engineers and programmers, but they don’t have a lot of experience in the workplace, let alone the government,” Forno says.
“Some of [Musk’s team] would not pass a government security clearance, and yet they’ve been given administrator access to both read data and update software.”
Ideally, the IT guy has to understand and respect the software in the first place. The arrogant Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” — which was coined at Facebook, but which even founder Mark Zuckerberg abandoned in favor of the less destructive “move fast with stable infra[structure]” — is a recipe for disaster in a government setting.
“I mean, this isn’t like a single server in your basement,” Forno says. “These federal systems, whether it’s Social Security or Medicare, they’ve been built over 30 and 40 years” — often using COBOL, a programming language from the 1950s that isn’t even taught in schools any more.
“There are workflows, there are processes, there’s patchwork stuff that DOGE doesn’t know about. And if that breaks, there will be ramifications.”
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Experts like Forno don’t even know what systems DOGE has accessed, and to what degree. The “god mode” of IT access has two levels: one where you can read and write data, another known as “read only.” But even the latter isn’t as safe as it sounds.
Reportedly, DOGE has read-only access to the government’s HR department, the OPM. Those computers don’t just contain payroll, salary and tax-withholding information for U.S. government employees, but their insurance plans, whether they’ve paid for counselling, and what their security clearance is.
“If I’m a Russian or Chinese hacker, I would want to target the people at DOGE inside OPM,” says Forno. IT experts like him have literally spent a decade trying to shore up OPM computers that were hacked in 2015, exposing the social security numbers of nearly 20 million applicants for security clearances.
And then there’s the payroll department, a.k.a. the U.S. Treasury, whose computers contain the bank details, social security numbers, and tax payment history for most Americans. Read-only access, which is what the Treasury secretary has assured us DOGE has, is bad enough.
“I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, I think it’s stupidity,” Forno concludes. “These people are shooting first, and they’re not giving people fair warning about dramatic changes, and one false move could crash the economy.”
How DOGE could hurt the U.S. economy
According to the January 20 executive order that renamed the U.S. Digital Service after Musk’s favorite meme, DOGE’s job was “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” That hardly sounded like the most dangerous-sounding weapon in history.
But given that government in the 21st century relies entirely on software and technology, that mandate allowed DOGE to became in effect the most powerful U.S. agency overnight. And now experts are struggling to find metaphors to explain just how bad the reign of tech support could be.
“This is like Revenge of the Nerds meets Animal House meets War Games.” That’s the movie-based metaphor favored by Emerson Tan, Chief Innovation Officer at Financial Empowerment Partners, which builds payment technologies for emerging markets — and saw DOGE’s destruction of USAID up close.
A decade ago, as the research head of a company that made cyberwarfare tools for the U.S. intelligence community, Tan’s job was to figure out, as he puts it, “how to implode a government.” His strategy papers are still secret, but their conclusion? “You do what DOGE is doing,” Tan says. “You do it through the IT systems” — especially those of the country’s payroll department.
“If a company’s IT department doesn’t function for a day, you can shrug that off,” Tan says. “Government in general, especially financial functions like the Treasury, cannot do that … if you interrupt the system, the system will have a heart attack.”
Treasury is especially vulnerable because it services the U.S. government debt, a constant process where bonds are always maturing and investors must be paid precisely on time. If this move-fast-and-break-things IT department were to try to fix the ancient COBOL code at the Treasury — and so far as we know, there has been no oversight that would prevent Musk pushing out a fix — they can induce a technical default.
Should the U.S. default on its debt, that would have a knock-on effect throughout the financial world. “If the overnight interbank lending market blows up,” Tan says, “you wake up in the morning and ATMs have stopped working.”
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This is one IT team that has opted “to basically smash stuff up,” Tan adds,” but at a rate where they don’t understand what they’re blowing up. So, the odds are pretty good that at some stage they’re going to step on a landmine and blow something important. I mean, the consequences could be everything from milk prices going up to a coup.”
Even DOGE’s meddling so far constitutes “a system administrator’s end-run around the Constitution,” Tan believes. When USAID was folded into the State Department, its computer systems were put in the hands of tech teams who don’t know how to run it.
The Supreme Court agreed with a lower court judge who ordered the government to restore $2 billion in USAID funding, but whether that is even possible is an open question.
“The systems have all been disintegrated,” he says. “Even if the courts says they have to restart it, if you’ve turned the system off to actually administer it, you can’t restart it. The end. the Constitution doesn’t matter anymore.”
Not to mention all the other potential knock-on effects. Tan predicts famine in South Sudan, at the very least, will result from the end of USAID — and worse, a general breakdown in the international order. Tan’s company, Financial Empowerment Partners, is looking to abandon its Washington D.C. HQ for “somewhere more trustworthy,” likely in Europe.
“The developing world has heard the message loud and clear, and that is America is our enemy,” Tan says. “Not our friend, not a development partner, our enemy.”
