While Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken an axe to the federal workforce, the group itself is hiring.
The US DOGE Service, formerly the US Digital Service (USDS), has been interviewing potential candidates in recent weeks and months, even offering salaries on the highest end of the government pay scale. WIRED spoke with one person who made it through part of the DOGE interview process about what it was like.
According to the interviewee, there appear to be five phases to the DOGE hiring process, all executed quickly over a two- to three-week period. The first step in the process is a short 15-minute screening call with a recruiter, followed by a tech assessment that applicants have three days to complete. If applicants pass this screening, they’ll be asked to participate in two different technical interviews with DOGE staff. The fifth and final interview is a placement interview, where applicants would learn more about what kinds of work they would be assigned if hired.
“I think it’s fair to call it a dream job,” the interviewee, who asked not to be named in order to protect their privacy, says of the USDS in its pre-Trump administration form. The interviewee says they were “impressed” by a December 2023 interview with Mina Hsiang, then the administrator of the USDS, on The Verge’s Decoder podcast. She described how the department, since its creation in 2014 by former president Barack Obama, brought a small group of technologists together to improve tech services across the federal government. The interviewee had applied to work at USDS in previous years, and relistening to Hsiang’s interview “was the inspiration to apply again,” they say.
The interviewee knew several federal workers who had already been laid off as part of the DOGE’s incursion into federal agencies, and though it was “top of the top of mind,” they say they were still “excited about getting an interview.”
During the initial 15-minute call, the recruiter outlined some of the possible projects DOGE might undertake. These included, the interviewee says, “leveraging AI to improve medical services for veterans,” “streamlining federal aid applications from Americans who experience natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes,” and “improving the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and expanding Americans’ access to financial assistance for higher education.”
These details about possible projects were also laid out in an email the interviewee received before the phone call, inviting them to speak to the recruiter. The interviewee, who had applied to USDS multiple times both before and shortly after the new Trump administration, says they weren’t sure how or why their application had caught the eye of the new DOGE Service. “Maybe they were just looking for a coder,” they say.
Seeing USDS referred to as the “US DOGE Service,” the interviewee says, made them “want to barf” because “it represented the hollowing out of the organization I appreciated. I didn’t know what to make of it, since I applied on a lark and hated what DOGE was doing. But I was ready to learn what they wanted and to explore what impact I could have.”
DOGE, according to the interviewee’s conversation with the recruiter, is looking to hire software engineers, software development and IT operations engineers, and project managers, all of which would be listed at GS-13 through 15 with salaries between $120,000 and $190,000. This salary range, according to a former USDS employee with knowledge of its hiring processes, is similar to what has been offered to USDS employees in previous years. WIRED previously reported that some members of DOGE with no government experience are drawing salaries well above $120,000, often making as much as or more than federal workers years into their government service. An unsigned agreement obtained by WIRED called for the Department of Labor to reimburse the USDS up to $1.3 million for using four DOGE affiliates over an 18-month period.
For the tech assessment portion of the application, the interviewee was asked to “create a simple website to analyze federal regulations to allow for more digestible and actionable insights to be made on potential deregulation efforts across the government” that are listed in the Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR). This exercise, as it turns out, may be particularly relevant to DOGE’s work. Last month, WIRED reported that DOGE affiliate Christopher Sweet has been put in charge of an initiative to use AI to crawl through the eCFR to identify regulations that could possibly be relaxed or rescinded. This work has already started at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The interviewee was not ultimately hired.
“I feel disappointed at the outcome, not unlike other job opportunities that don’t proceed,” the interviewee says. “I also feel frustrated to be rejected by the organization that has destroyed the original USDS that I respected.”
But, they say, they’re not deterred by the rejection. “In reading about some of DOGE’s people’s public behavior, I remain confident in the quality of my skills, including as compared to what I see of theirs,” they say.
On DOGE’s website, a “Join DOGE” page states that it is “looking for world-class talent to work long hours identifying/eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. These are full-time, salaried positions for software engineers, product managers, designers, lawyers, data scientists, business analysts, cybersecurity professionals, and other fields.” Previously, the US Digital Service application allowed applicants to choose from one of over 20 “areas of expertise” from a drop-down menu, ranging from artificial intelligence to content strategy to accessibility. The dropdown menu for the DOGE Service, on the “Join DOGE” site, lists only 11, including software engineering, cybersecurity, and business analysis. For example, accessibility is no longer listed as an area of expertise on the new DOGE hiring website. This narrowing of roles and expertise, the former USDS employee says, shows how the goals and priorities of the DOGE Service have drastically shifted. If a priority, for instance, is removing DEI language from the websites of different government agencies, certain roles just might no longer be necessary.
The beginnings of this change took place on President Donald Trump’s first day in office, when he signed an executive order renaming and repurposing the USDS as the US DOGE Service.
Under the executive order, there are technically two DOGEs: The initial USDS that has been repackaged into the US DOGE Service, which the executive order states will be granted “access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” and the second DOGE, a temporary organization headed by the USDS administrator, which will run until July 4, 2026. This temporary organization allows DOGE to hire what are known as Special Government Employees (SGEs)—people who join the government for a period of up to 130 days in a year before returning to the private sector. Musk has been one such SGE.
Many of the people at Musk’s DOGE have included young, inexperienced engineers who have access to sensitive data across agencies, and conservative lawyers and Trump-world veterans who support the mission of cutting the federal workforce and using data to facilitate the administration’s agenda, particularly on immigration.
USDS, meanwhile, had more than 100 employees at the start of Trump’s second term. Many departed after the department’s transition into the DOGE service and the “firewall” built between Musk’s DOGE and the legacy USDS. Now, only a few dozen of the original employees remain.
This situation has made recruiting new and qualified talent to the permanent USDS more difficult, says a current USDS employee not authorized to speak to the press. The employee tells WIRED that USDS has hired a contractor to manage talent acquisition for the next generation of USDS employees.
The White House and a member of DOGE’s recruitment team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Makena Kelly contributed reporting.
