DOGE Sparks Surveillance Fear Across the US Government

WIRED spoke to current employees at 13 federal agencies for this story who expressed fears about potentially being monitored by software programs.

Some said that routine software updates and notifications, perhaps once readily glossed over, have taken on ominous new meanings.

At the US Agency for International Development , one worker was caught off guard by Google ’s Gemini AI chatbot, which kicked off days before Trump took office.

At the Federal Bureau of Investigation , anxiety around officials possibly targeting officers and activities perceived as being disloyal to the president has cratered morale.

An employee at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA ), whose work with international partners is being audited by DOGE operatives, says they and their colleagues began avoiding messaging one another and have “cut down on putting things in writing”.

Sources with knowledge of the US government’s insider threat programs describe them as largely inefficient and labor intensive, requiring overstretched teams of analysts to manually pore through daily barrages of alerts that include many false positives.

Any effort by the Trump administration to extend the reach of such tools or widen their parameters likely would result in a significant spike in false positives that would take considerable time to comb through.