In late February furloughed staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were invited back to their offices in 15-minute windows to collect their belongings.They walked out, some in tears, carrying boxes of personal items — but many were also worried about the personal information they were leaving behind in the USAID office systems.
The specific concern was over the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the bureaucracy-slashing group created by the Trump administration. No one knows exactly what personal data the group has grabbed.
“The concerns are over DOGE’s capability, their surveillance,” said a staffer on administrative leave, who walked out the USAID doors that day. He does not want to use his name for fear of repercussions.
Staffers like him turned to the encrypted Signal app to chat among themselves about what was happening. Roughly 90 to 95 per cent of his fellow employees were laid off following DOGE’s dismantling of the agency.
He’s in seven Signal chats on a range of topics from litigation and job fairs to how to restore U.S. foreign aid in the future.
“I am used to using it in closed societies,” he said of Signal. “And obviously we didn’t think that would be the case here in the U.S.”
People associated with DOGE forcibly entered USAID on Feb. 1, a Saturday, and sought to access staff information. The Associated Press reported that the team entered what’s known as a SCIF — a sensitive compartmented information facility — a room inside the office and potentially accessed sensitive information. DOGE did not respond to CBC’s questions about these claims.
Taylor Williamson has worked on USAID contracts through a partner organization for the past 20 years. He’s now laid off.
“When everyone started getting furloughed at the end of January we all started texting each other to say ‘Are you OK?” he said. And then the chats “blew up” on Signal in early February.
“Because of the influence of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg people are rightly or wrongly afraid that their data would be shared with the government,” he said.
“Given there are these tech folks running around in government, there was an intense fear.”
The U.S. federal government purge led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has allegedly saved $55 billion largely through cutting jobs and contracts. Some government workers have resigned in protest over the restructuring moves and Musk’s access to sensitive data.
On Tuesday a federal judge determined that efforts by Musk and his team to close the USAID most likely violated the constitution “in multiple ways.” And they were ordered to “not disclose outside of USAID any … personal information or information contained in an individual’s personnel file, security clearance file.”
The dangerous part of all this, says David Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University whose work focuses on strategic communication and internet-related strategies, is that DOGE may have accessed Social Security numbers and other information that is supposed to be protected.
“Trump’s DOGE team has repeatedly accessed citizen data which was previously off limits,” he said.
“It is so unprecedented that it is hard to find words for it,” he said, adding that Signal is the only safe place for the federal workforce to chat because it’s not accessible by the government. DOGE can access email and other information on work devices, he said.
Personal information security amid the dramatic workforce reduction has become such a concern that The Washington Post published a story in early Feb with the headline Federal workers: Here’s how to lock down your communications. The article made the point that the likelihood of threats to personal security has increased since the new administration came in with its links to tech company executives such as Meta’s Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Musk. And it highlighted how DOGE is grabbing “vast amounts of data” about employees from federal agencies.
One of the key recommendations was to use Signal for texts, because an app like Messenger, for example, is owned by Meta and collects more metadata. Other suggestions included carefully choosing who you communicate with on such apps.
Randy Chester, the vice president representing USAID foreign service officers at the American Foreign Service Association says it’s simply the “strangest time in my entire life.”
“We don’t know what DOGE has accessed, and that is the big fear,” he said, adding that he’s moved over to facial and two-factor identification on everything, and he’s put a hold on his personal credit systems, out of concern that a DOGE person could potentially sell his Social Security number.
Chester said he understands why people are using Signal. The American Foreign Services Association advises people not to use government devices but rather personal devices instead.
“The worry is that the government would use info against you to terminate you. Or you could have your security clearance revoked. There are lasting implications with the different levels of security clearances,” he said.
The website for the association has links to a “Virtual Go Bag” stating “everyone in the Foreign Service knows what a ‘go bag’ is … But how many of us have an ‘Employment Go Bag.'” This type of virtual protection includes downloading personal files off of work devices, according to the site, and also to obtain personal liability insurance and consider putting a freeze on personal credit information to prevent it from being used to open new credit card accounts.
Chester hopes the ongoing legal action against DOGE and Musk will provide some clarity.
“I hope DOGE will be called to testify so we can find out what data they have collected, why they took it and why they needed it,” he said.
In the meantime, the phones of the federal workforce in Washington are lighting up with encrypted apps and chats as people carefully share information as they try to figure out their futures.