Jeremy Shedd at the White House: Hacking into the Secret Service of the GS Administration and How to Join the DOGE-Employment

It was announced last week that Shedd, who previously worked as a software engineer for eight years at Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, would be the new TTS director. In emails to TTS staff, Shedd reinforced the Trump administration’s commitment to cutting costs and maximizing efficiency—something Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been charged with carrying out.

Elon Musk’s minions—from trusted sidekicks to random college students and former Musk company interns—have taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. The team wants to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech and other things according to leaked documents obtained by WIRED.

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“I’ve spent my entire career in Silicon Valley,” Shedd wrote in an introductory email to staff last Thursday and obtained by WIRED. “If we work together and execute well we will be able to navigate the policies, leverage our technical expertise and be a critical part of accelerating technology adoption across agencies to enable great gains in efficiency.”

The GSA Leadership Team: How Responsible are You? Sources of the WIRED Analysis of recent GSA Operations and Programs, and the Role of the DOGE Executive Order

The form obtained by WIRED said these should be items you’ve completed. “It is OK to have a mix of big projects and small wins (examples: fixed a critical bug, shipped XYZ feature, saved this amount on a renegotiated contract, ect [sic] … If you are an engineer or designer please include a link to a PR [pull request] or a screenshot of one of your wins from the past 3 months.”

The new GSA leadership team has prioritized downsizing the GSA’s real estate portfolio, canceling convenience contracts, and rolling out AI tools for use by the federal government, according to internal documents and interviews with sources familiar with the situation. There were several items written on a white board in a room at the GSA office in DC earlier this week. It said spending cuts of $585m, Regulations removed of 15, square feet sold/terminated 203,000 sf. There’s no note of who wrote the message, but it appears to be a tracker of cuts made or proposed by the team.

“Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren’t government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. Doge will be able to conduct surveillment on government employees and review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts.

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told WIRED on Friday.

There also appears to be an effort to use IT credentials from the Executive Office of the President to access GSA laptops and internal GSA infrastructure. Typically, access to agency systems requires workers to be employed at such agencies, sources say. Musk’s team could try to obtain better equipment from the GSA, but sources are concerned that the mandate laid out in the DOGE executive order will allow the body to access GSA systems and data. That includes sensitive procurement data, data internal to all the systems and services GSA offers, and internal monitoring software to surveil GSA employees as part of normal auditing and security processes.

“I believe these people do not want to help the federal government provide services to the American people,” says a current GSA employee who asked not to be named, citing fears of retaliation. “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company.”