Second, it wasn’t clear that the DOGE affiliates had the authority to either access these systems or do what they purportedly wanted to. An executive order signed by president Donald Trump gives the US DOGE Service broad authority to access unclassified systems. But while Holmes is detailed to DOI from USDS, Hassen and Trampe are DOI employees and are not, according to one source with knowledge, even part of a formal DOGE team. That means they have no authority or privileges past those of a normal DOI employee. Even Holmes, the acting chief HR officer, does not obviously have the authority to cut off the email accounts of DOI employees outside her own office, let alone workers situated at other agencies or even outside the executive branch.
To determine whether it was possible to grant the requested access, the officials concluded, it would be necessary to review federal privacy and information security law as well as lines of authority within DOI.
According to sources with knowledge, these issues were raised at a Thursday morning meeting between top technical and legal staff at DOI and DOGE, where the career officials asked what specifically the DOGE affiliates were trying to do so as to evaluate whether there were legal means of granting them the necessary access. When pressed for information that would allow officials to evaluate DOGE’s request and the risks it would raise, Trampe, the sources say, simply reiterated that they sought system-level access that would allow them to create, pause, or delete email accounts, citing the authority of the executive order and saying the matter was not up for debate. It was made clear during the meeting, the sources say, that the deadline for granting the access was Friday.
Following the meeting, top technical and legal officials drafted a risk assessment. (“Full administrative/root access enables individuals to initiate and modify personnel and payroll actions, potentially locking out other authorized users. Additionally, personnel with elevated privileges across multiple systems become prime targets for credential compromise by nation-state adversaries or other malicious actors,” they wrote.) Ultimately, they concluded that because of the inherent risks, only Burgum had the authority to grant the access DOGE requested.
Late Friday afternoon, the chief information and information security officers and the associate solicitor at DOI were, according to sources with knowledge, placed on leave and told they were being investigated for workplace behavior. It is believed within the department that on Saturday, DOGE was granted access to the FPPS, though sources were unclear on the level of the privileges they’d been given.
“We are working to execute the President’s directive to cut costs and make the government more efficient for the American people and have taken actions to implement President Trump’s Executive Orders,” says a DOI spokesperson who did not give their name.
“These people,” says one source at DOI who worries that DOGE affiliates could inadvertently destroy parts of the nearly 30-year-old FPPS, stop paychecks, or allow for a breach of the entire system, “have no idea what they’re doing.”
