DOGE ‘touch-base’ sessions with GSA staff preceded probationary terminations, source says

The Department of Government Efficiency conducted a series of “touch-base” sessions at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services leading up to the agency’s move to cut staff, asking employees to share details about interagency projects that sometimes contained sensitive information and stirring privacy concerns among the workforce, according to documents shared with FedScoop. 

A source familiar with the inner workings of the TTS-managed U.S. Digital Corps said that DOGE representatives asked them and others in the two-year fellowship for early-career technologists to show coding work, and that staff was hesitant to share code and sensitive information related to work with other agencies. USDC fellows work through interagency agreements across the federal government, including in agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of State, and the National Institutes of Health.

DOGE interviews with GSA staffers, including USDC fellows, preceded the agency’s move to begin terminating probationary employees, according to the source. USDC fellows had 15-minute interviews, or “touch-base sessions,” with DOGE representatives that the source believes informed some of those termination decisions.  

During those meetings, which were led by DOGE advisers — who only identified themselves by their first names — or Thomas Shedd, the newly appointed director of TTS, staffers were asked about their skillsets and work, the source said. A GSA spokesperson told FedScoop that Shedd initiated these meetings, and that “getting a sense of the technical work being performed by the organization is an essential part of understanding what the team is doing and what they are capable of.”

The source said the DOGE representatives did not have government emails or Personal Identity Verification cards, and they were not interested in showing those advisers anything that could potentially be sensitive information. 

In a Slack message from Shedd, he referred to the DOGE representatives as advisers and said they were in the process of getting credentials. Shedd, previously a software engineer at Tesla, the Elon Musk-owned electric vehicle maker, said the representatives were not sharing their last names to protect their privacy because of media scrutiny, according to the source. 

The source then said that Shedd minimized communications with TTS staff from there. The GSA spokesperson disputed that characterization, saying that there were multiple “all hands” meetings in late January and early February to “answer staff’s questions and hear their concerns.”

A calendar invite to a DOGE touch-base session did not show a government email for the DOGE representatives, according to the source and substantiated by documents shared with FedScoop. 

The source confirmed that 55 of 70 USDC employees were faced with termination, leaving only 15 to be retained. Employees on Slack reported that other parts of TTS had been notified of their dismissals in both individual and group calls. 

This story was updated Feb. 13, 2025, with responses from a GSA spokesperson.