Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
Elon Musk’s henchmen, from trusted classmates to random university students and former interns of the Musk company, have taken care of the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. The team is already trying to use White House safety credentials to obtain unusual access to GSA Tech, implement a set of new AI software and recreate the office at the image of X, according to the filtered documents obtained by Wired.
Some of the same people who helped Musk take care of Twitter more than two years ago are now registered as GSA official employees. Nicole Hollander, who slept at the Twitter headquarters as an unofficial member of the Musk Transition team, has access to the high -level agency and an official government email address, according to the documents seen by Wired. Hollander’s husband, Steve Davis, also slept in the office. Now he has assumed a main role in the Efficiency Department of the Musk Government (Doge). Thomas Shedd, the recently installed director of technology transformation services within GSA, worked as a software engineer in Tesla for eight years. Edward Coristine, who previously admitted to Neuralink, has been incorporated together with Ethan ShaotranA Harvard senior who is developing his own programming assistant backed by OpenAI and participated in a Hackathon XAI.
“I think 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 appointed, citing reprisal fears. “They are acting like this is an acquisition of a technology company.”
The team seems to be carrying out the Musk agenda: reduce the federal government as quickly as possible. They are currently pointing to a 50 percent reduction in spending for each office managed by the GSA, according to the documents obtained by Wired.
There also seems to be an effort to use IT credentials of the president’s executive office to access GSA laptops and GSA’s internal infrastructure. In general, access to agencies systems requires workers to work in such agencies, sources say. Although Musk’s team could be trying to obtain better laptops and GSA equipment, the sources fear that the mandate established in the Executive Order of Doge gives the body wide access to GSA’s systems and data. This includes confidential acquisition data, internal data of all the systems and services offered by GSA and the internal monitoring software to monitor GSA employees as part of the normal audit and safety processes.
Access could give Musk representatives the ability to remove laptops, listen to meetings, read emails, among many other things, said a former Biden official to Wired on Friday.
“Granting Doge personnel, many of whom are not government employees, access without restrictions on internal government systems and confidential data propose a great security risk for the federal government and for the American public,” said the Biden official. “Not only Dege can review the acquisition -sensitive information on the main government contracts, but it can also actively monitor government employees.”
Do you have a tip?
Are you a current or previous employee of GSA or other government technology worker? We would like to know about you. Using a work without work, contact the reporters in makena_kellly@wired.com or zoe_schiffer@wired.com. You can also communicate with them more safely on the signal in Makenakelly. 32 or Zoeschiffer. 87.
The new GSA leadership team has prioritized the reduction of personnel from the GSA real estate portfolio, canceling convenience contracts and implementing AI tools for use by the federal government, in accordance with internal documents and interviews With familiar sources with the situation. In a GSA office in Washington, DC, earlier this week, there were three articles written on a white board sitting in a large vacancy. “The expenditure cuts $ 585 m, the eliminated regulations, 15, the square feet sold/finished 203,000 square feet,” reads, according to a photo seen by Wired. There is no note of who wrote the message, but it seems to be a tracker of cuts made or proposed by the team.
“We notified to the commercial real estate market that two properties of GSA would soon be in the sale, and we finished three leases,” Stephen Ehikian, the newly appointed interim administrator of GSA, said on Tuesday, in an email to GSA’s staff, confirming the Agency approach, confirming the agency’s approach. By reducing real estate costs. “This is our first step in the correct size of the real estate portfolio.”
