I was fired by DOGE, but I am not a victim

On Valentine's Day, I received a note that upended my life. “Due to the restructuring and changes to USDS’s mission, USDS no longer has need for your services,” it read.

As a cybersecurity professional for more than 30 years, I was aware that I was taking a risk when, the night before, I sent a call for volunteers to speak at a rally being organized by the group Federal Workers Against DOGE, to a private list of current and former U.S. Digital Service workers.

I don’t regret my decision. This is not a time for federal workers to be making safe, self-preserving choices. If ever there was a time for dedicated civil servants to act courageously, that time is now.

By writing this, I’m incurring even more risk. I have spent the past few days trying my best to scrub my data from the internet, out of concern that the wealthiest man on Earth might send his minions after me. I am writing this anyway, because I hope that in doing so I can contribute in some way to saving our country from people who want to destroy it.

This is not idle rhetoric — things are as bad as you think, or worse.

I left the private sector to join USDS in 2023 because I believed in its mission, “to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need,” and its founding idea of bringing private-sector technical expertise into public service to modernize government systems and make them more effective. Given my cybersecurity and engineering background, I was assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where I provided information security oversight for the department’s flagship website, VA.gov.

At Veterans Affairs, I joined an organization staffed by capable and dedicated public servants — not the caricatures of laziness and incompetence that President Trump and Elon Musk would have us imagine. The biggest challenge facing VA wasn't the quality of its people, but the fact that there weren’t enough of them. And now there are even fewer.

When Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency on his first day back in office, he grafted it onto the side of USDS like a tumor. According to an executive order, the ‘D’ in USDS now stands for DOGE. Trump also signed an order exempting members of the DOGE team from the mandatory background checks and drug testing to which all other federal employees and contractors are subjected before they can access sensitive data and systems.

DOGE installed a Singapore-based telemedicine startup founder, Justin Fulcher, at VA. At 32 years old, Fulcher is wizened by the so-called department’s standards. But besides loyalty and shared ideology, he has no discernible qualifications for the job. We’ll apparently never know whether he could pass a background check. The day before I was fired, he fired 1,000 VA staff for unspecified "performance" reasons.

Just like that, the agency with the massive responsibility of making good on the country’s promises to its veterans — an agency that was already understaffed and overworked — became much more so. With my departure the following day, they lost the only government employee overseeing VA.gov’s cybersecurity. And under yet another recent executive order, the VA (and all federal agencies) can only replace any one of us after first firing four others.

Look at the path DOGE has taken. Beginning with the Office of Personnel Management, it has gone on to slash staff and gain unwarranted privileged access to the Treasury Department, the IRS, the Social Security Administration and now the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The people on this smash-and-grab tour through the federal government received no votes, no congressional vetting, not even a background check. Yet they now have access to extremely sensitive private information about almost every American, and an unknown level of control over all government payments, staffing and internal security controls.

You may have already suspected that there is nothing “efficient” about this, and you probably don’t need my cybersecurity expertise to realize this represents a massive risk to our collective security.

In spite of all this, I would return to the Department of Veterans Affairs (although not to the U.S. "DOGE" Service) in the unlikely event that I were invited to do so, because I still believe in its mission. Someone needs to do it — why shouldn't it be me?

But for now, I can at least say something I couldn’t say publicly when I still hoped to be part of the bulwark against DOGE on the inside: If you are a federal employee and you are asked to do something that violates the oath you took to uphold the Constitution, please don't. You didn’t take an oath to Musk, Trump, a political party or a worldview. This is not the time to play it safe, to wait and see, or to hope for the best. Be brave, stick to your principles and stand up for our democracy.

Someone needs to do it; why shouldn't it be you?

Jonathan Kamens is a public servant and engineer with over 30 years of cybersecurity experience. On Feb. 14, he was fired by DOGE from his position at the Veterans Administration.

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