Musk's DOGE using AI to snoop on U.S. federal workers, sources say

By Alexandra Ulmer, Marisa Taylor, Jeffrey Dastin and Alexandra Alper

(Reuters) -Trump administration officials have told some U.S. government employees that Elon Musk's DOGE team of technologists is using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Donald Trump and his agenda, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

While much of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency remains shrouded in secrecy, the surveillance would mark an extraordinary use of technology to identify expressions of perceived disloyalty in a workforce already upended by widespread firings and severe cost cutting. 

The DOGE team is also using the Signal app to communicate, according to one other person with direct knowledge of the matter, potentially violating federal record-keeping rules because messages can be set to disappear after a period of time.

And they have “heavily” deployed Musk’s Grok AI chatbot – an aspiring ChatGPT rival – as part of their work slashing the federal government, said that person. Reuters could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.

The White House, DOGE and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The use of AI and Signal reinforces concerns among cybersecurity experts and government ethicists that DOGE is operating with limited transparency and that billionaire Musk or the Trump administration could use information gathered with AI to further their own interests, or to go after political targets.

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said DOGE’s use of privacy-focused Signal adds to growing concerns over data security practices after top Trump administration officials came under fire last month for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

“If they’re using Signal and not backing up every message to federal files, then they are acting unlawfully,” she said.

Reuters’ interviews with nearly 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s operations – and an examination of hundreds of pages of court documents from lawsuits challenging DOGE's access to data – highlight its unorthodox usage of AI and other technology in federal government operations.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk, the two people said. 

The EPA, which enforces laws such as the Clean Air Act and works to protect the environment, has come under intense scrutiny by the Trump administration. Since January, it has put nearly 600 employees on leave and said it will eliminate 65% of its budget, which could require further staffing reductions.

Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats, said the two sources familiar with these comments. “We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” a third source familiar with the EPA said. Reuters could not independently confirm if the AI was being implemented.  

The Trump officials said DOGE would be looking for people whose work did not align with the administration's mission, the first two sources said. “Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager said, according to one of the sources.

After publication of this story, the EPA acknowledged in a statement that it was “looking at AI to better optimize agency functions and administrative efficiencies” but said it was not using AI “as it makes personnel decisions in concert with DOGE.” It did not directly address whether it was using AI to surveil workers. Musk has depicted DOGE as a tech-driven effort to make the U.S. federal government more efficient by targeting waste, fraud and abuse. He has said the goal was to trim $1 trillion in spending, or 15% of the U.S. annual budget.

Few dispute the U.S. government and its aging computer systems are due for modernization. But Democrats say Musk and Trump are purging the government of non-partisan public servants and installing loyalists who would turn a blind eye to corruption. Many Republicans and independents are also critical of DOGE's actions.

Clark, the ethics specialist, said the prospective surveillance was worrisome. It “sounds like an abuse of government power to suppress or deter speech that the president of the United States doesn’t like,” she said.

Last year, before Trump was elected, Musk suggested AI could be used to replace government workers, according to a person with direct knowledge of his comments. “The concept was that through taking the government data that they could build the most dynamic AI system ever,” the person said, adding that AI could then “do the work.”

The complex endeavor would entail teaching AI systems to automate some of the work currently done by federal employees. 

As a special government employee, Musk is prohibited under ethics laws from involving himself in government activities that would benefit him or his companies. 

TRANSPARENCY QUESTIONS

In addition to the use of Signal, some DOGE staffers are bypassing other vetting processes and chains of custody for official government documents by working simultaneously out of Google Docs instead of circulating single copies of drafts, a source briefed by a government official said. 

“There's multiple people in one Google Doc editing things simultaneously,” the source said, referring to the online word processing software. That was partly how DOGE was working so quickly, the source added. 

The Trump administration has argued that DOGE, as an arm of the Executive Office of the President, is not subject to laws that allow the public to seek access to records produced by government agencies. 

Citing DOGE’s “unusual secrecy,” including its use of Signal, a federal judge on March 10 ordered the group to start handing records to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog that had sued to request DOGE documents under federal freedom of information laws. As of Monday, the watchdog said, no records had been turned over.

As Musk embeds his young DOGE team of engineers and aides deep inside the government’s digital infrastructure, accusations that DOGE is deliberately operating in secrecy have emerged in court cases challenging the authority of Musk, the world’s richest man, to remake the federal government.

DOGE employees have dramatically tightened administrative controls at some agencies, keeping staffers in the dark while making significant operational changes, according to interviews and court filings. 

When Musk’s team took control of the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, in late January, they shut OPM employees out of a database containing sensitive personal information of tens of millions of current and former federal workers, according to court filings and Reuters’ previous reporting.

OPM is at the heart of the administration’s vision to shrink the government, issuing government-wide directives that are seen as blueprints for downsizing the civil service.

Since late January, more than 100 tech staff at OPM have lost access to the cloud where key applications are stored, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Only two people still have access  — one career staffer and Greg Hogan, a political appointee who worked at an AI startup and is now OPM’s chief information officer, the sources added. Hogan did not respond to a request for comment.

(Ulmer and Dastin reported from San Francisco; Taylor and Alper reported from Washington. Additional reporting by Joseph Tanfani, Valerie Volcovici and Humeyra Pamuk. Editing by Jason Szep)