What Happens When Bureaucratic Nihilism Gets Root Access
How a rogue efficiency squad tried to hijack federal payroll systems—and why that should terrify you.
Imagine if your HOA president demanded the master key to every apartment in the building, citing a vague directive from a former landlord and insisting it’s “not up for debate.”
Now replace that HOA with the Department of the Interior, the building with the federal government, and the keys with administrative access to the payroll system of 275,000 federal workers—including those in the Department of Justice and, hilariously, the Supreme Court. Welcome to the DOGE era: where government “efficiency” means rooting around in the guts of critical infrastructure like it’s a test server for a startup.
This is not a satire sketch. This is a very real story about power, paranoia, and people who absolutely should not be trusted with production-level access.
DOGE: The Department of Government Efficiency or The Department of Goofball Entropy?
At the heart of this tale is the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—whose operatives tried to strong-arm their way into full, God-mode access to the Federal Personnel and Payroll System (FPPS).
This system handles pay and personnel data for over a quarter million federal workers, including agencies outside the executive branch. In other words: it’s not just a payroll tool, it’s the digital circulatory system of the federal workforce.
DOGE affiliates—including an energy exec, an HR officer, and an advisor to the DOI Secretary—demanded unprecedented access with a level of urgency usually reserved for cyberattacks or impending coups. The justification? They wanted to be able to create, pause, or delete email accounts. That’s the cover story. But the access they were demanding would have allowed them to do much more, including stopping paychecks and viewing sensitive personnel files.
That includes Supreme Court justices.
Yes, you read that right: A few unelected officials, backed by a vague Trump-era executive order, wanted the technical ability to cancel Clarence Thomas’s direct deposit. Not since Dick Cheney shot a man in the face has an abuse of power looked so absurd—and yet so menacing.
When Authoritarian Tech Fantasies Meet the Bureaucratic State
This is not just a story about rogue officials on a power trip. It’s a glimpse into something deeper: the growing tension between the machinery of government and the ideology of disruption.
DOGE is the embodiment of a technocratic fantasy rooted in authoritarian populism. It’s the belief that “career bureaucrats” are the problem, and that efficiency means gutting institutional safeguards. Never mind that those safeguards exist precisely to prevent rogue actors from accessing massive databases of personal information—or nuking paychecks because someone forgot to update a script.
This is the Trumpian model of governance: bypass expertise, punish dissent, and break things until something profitable emerges from the rubble.
The irony is almost too rich: a group named after “efficiency” trying to seize control of a 30-year-old legacy system with all the finesse of someone ordering steak at a vegan café.
Who Are These People?
Let’s pause and zoom in. Who, exactly, is making these demands?
• Tyler Hassen: An energy executive turned budget overseer.
• Stephanie Holmes: HR chief who believes email accounts are the key to cutting costs.
• Katrine Trampe: Adviser to Doug Burgum, now apparently LARPing as a sysadmin.
Sources say these DOGE operatives didn’t even follow the protocol laid out by their own executive order. One of them wasn’t formally assigned to DOGE. Another didn’t have authority outside their office. And yet, when questioned, they pulled the classic “Because I said so” card, backed up by a Friday deadline.
What Happens When Adults Say No
Career officials at DOI—people whose job is literally to prevent catastrophic breaches—said no.
They documented the risks: credential leaks, W-2 access, potential nation-state compromise. They drafted memos. They asked clarifying questions. In response, they were placed on leave and investigated for “workplace behavior.”
Translation: They were punished for doing their jobs.
This is how authoritarianism metastasizes. Not with tanks in the streets, but with bureaucratic purges disguised as “efficiency drives.” You replace institutional memory with loyalists, then hand those loyalists keys to systems they don’t understand. And when something breaks—when payroll collapses or a breach rivals the OPM hack—you blame the very people you sidelined.
Can You Efficiently Burn Down a House?
The deeper truth here is about the contradiction at the heart of technocratic populism: the belief that you can improve a system by destroying the people who understand it. That if something is old, it must be bad. That “streamlining” means removing all checks, all balances, all expertise—until all that’s left is power, unmediated by process.
Efficiency, in this worldview, is just a euphemism for unchecked authority.
But a government isn’t a startup. It’s not supposed to “move fast and break things.” It’s supposed to move deliberately and protect people. And that’s exactly what the career officials tried to do—until they were sidelined by people who believe the word career is synonymous with enemy.
The Takeaway
This isn’t about IT permissions. It’s about legitimacy.
When unelected appointees demand access they don’t understand, cite powers they don’t have, and punish those who resist, that’s not reform. That’s a coup by spreadsheet.
And when “efficiency” means you can shut off a Supreme Court Justice’s paycheck with a click, maybe it’s time we admit that the real threat to government isn’t bureaucracy.
It’s the people who think they’re above it.
If DOGE really wanted to make government efficient, they could’ve just deleted their own email accounts.
That’s the point.