by Mohar Chatterjee at Politico
Employees of a defense tech unit say they were sidelined by DOGE. “Either we die quickly or we die slowly,” says the director.
Under pressure from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, nearly all the staff of the Defense Digital Service — the Pentagon’s fast-track tech development arm — are resigning over the coming month, according to the director and three other current members of the office granted anonymity to discuss their job status freely, as well as internal emails.
The resignations will effectively shut down the decade-old program after the end of April.
The Defense Digital Service was created in 2015 to help the Pentagon adopt fast tech fixes during national security crises and push Silicon Valley-style innovation inside the Pentagon. It built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid, drone detection technologies and more.
Once dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” DDS was one of the department’s earliest efforts to inject Silicon Valley ethos into its massive bureaucracy.
Jennifer Hay, director of the 14-person office,…