USDS Engineering Director Resigns: ‘This Is Not the Mission I Came to Serve’
The director of data science and engineering for the United States Digital Service—which Elon Musk rebranded as the US DOGE Service—has resigned from her position.
Anne Marshall, the now former director, spent more than a decade as an engineer at Amazon before joining USDS in September 2023. In December, she was promoted to director of data science and engineering, but only served around two months in the role before resigning on Wednesday.
“Today I resigned from the US Digital Service. It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be able to do this work, with this team of amazing people,” Marshall wrote on LinkedIn on Wednesday evening. “Unfortunately, DOGE chose to fire one third of them last week. These cuts were shortsighted, ill-informed, and indiscriminate. The government and the American people will be worse off from the loss of these people.”
Yesterday, legacy USDS employees met with two representatives from DOGE to discuss the organization’s future, following the Friday evening firings of around 50 product managers, designers, and others at USDS. Amy Gleason, a former Trump administration USDS official, and Kendall Lindemann, formerly of McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, explained to the remaining staff members that DOGE would become increasingly more hands-on within the organization over the coming weeks and months, USDS sources say.
Gleason and Lindemann, who did not provide their roles at DOGE, said that anyone not already terminated would be considered part of the DOGE team going forward and that the two previously separated teams would merge. The consolidation of the two different groups, the new DOGE members and the legacy USDS staff, is a marked difference compared to the rest of the last month at the organization: Earlier this month, USDS workers told WIRED that DOGE had built a “firewall” separating the two groups. Up until Tuesday, the only DOGE representative to join a broader legacy USDS team meeting was Stephanie M. Holmes, who identified herself as the group’s new HR person.
“It’s all DOGE going forward,” one USDS source tells WIRED.
Still, it’s unclear who is legally running DOGE, and not even DOGE employees know. On Monday, Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House Office of Administration, issued a sworn statement in a lawsuit claiming that Musk, who has championed and appeared to lead DOGE since Trump’s reelection, was not leading DOGE as its formal “administrator.” Fisher described Musk’s role as nothing more than “senior advisor” to the president with “no greater authority than other senior White House advisors.”
USDS staff are still in the dark regarding leadership as well. Multiple legacy USDS employees tell WIRED they have no idea who the acting administrator is, despite requesting their identity multiple times.
Neither Gleason nor Lindemann disclosed the names of USDS’s administrator or deputy administrator on Tuesday. The White House did not respond to requests for comment from WIRED.
“I do not believe that DOGE can continue to deliver the work of USDS, based on their actions so far,” Marshall wrote. “I am leaving by choice, no forks, no forced exits, just actively, sadly, walking away. This is not the mission I came to serve.”
