Government tech workers are forced to defend their work
What’s in a Name: Thomas Shedd, Diane Coristine, Zoeschiffer, Nicole Hollander, or Steve Davis?
The installation of Thomas Shedd on top of the federal IT structure has thrown an agency in charge of servicing US government technical infrastructure into disarray.
The people who helped Musk take over the micro-finance platform are now classified as official GSA employees. Nicole Hollander has high-level agency access and an official government email address, according to documents viewed by WIRED. Steve Davis also slept in the office. He was hired by Musk to head up his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Thomas Shedd, the recently installed director of the Technology Transformation Services within GSA, worked as a software engineer at Tesla for eight years. Edward Coristine, who previously interned at Neuralink, has been onboarded along with Ethan Shaotran, a Harvard senior who is developing his own OpenAI-backed scheduling assistant and participated in an xAI hackathon.
Do you work for the GSA or any other government tech worker? We’d like to hear from you. [email protected] or [email protected] can be reached if you use a nonwork phone or computer. You can also contact them more securely on Signal at makenakelly.32 or zoeschiffer.87.
“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 do our job well, we will be able to navigate the policies, leverage the technical expertise, and be a key part of speeding technology adoption in agencies.
WIRED: Getting The Most Out Of The Public Occupation: How the GSA’s IT Infrastructure and Personnel Managed Under DOGE
The form obtained by WIRED says that these should be items that have been 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. At a GSA office in Washington, DC, earlier this week, there were three items written on a white board sitting in a large, vacant room. According to a photo viewed by WIRED, it reads, Spending cuts $585 m, Regulations removed, 15, Square feet sold/terminated 203,000 sf. There is no note about who wrote the message, but it is most likely a tracker of cuts made or proposed by the team.
A Biden official said that the granting of unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government. Doge will be able to actively surveil government employees and review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts.
A former Biden official told WIRED on Friday that the access could allow Musk’s proxies to listen in on meetings, read emails, and remote into laptops.
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. Workers are usually employed at agency systems where access is required. The mandate of the DOGE executive order could allow Musk to get a lot of the GSA’s systems and data, sources fear. 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.”
