Editor's note: This story is posted with permission from the anonymous federal employee who shared it with us. Some edits were made for length and clarity.
I'm a Navy Veteran and IT Specialist with the US Geological Survey in a water science center in the western United States. While it has been a long time, I once held a security clearance when I was in the Navy. I know how confidential, secret, and top-secret information is supposed to be handled.
Everything that has been reported on what the DOGE team has access to terrifies me with respect to cybersecurity and national security. The privacy issues are bad enough. It is reported that they ran something through CloudFlare, but did they ensure they were using the GOV/FedRAMP-approved version? Did they use their hard drives and/or cloud services? Have they been through the required ethics and security training? Just being a good coder doesn't give you that knowledge.
The science conducted by our Center will be crucial in the coming years, as water sources in the western United States will be severely impacted by climate change. I know the current administration doesn't care about climate change, but it is real and will affect millions of people in this part of the country. In addition, water science centers are unique in that only part of our funding comes directly from congressional appropriations. The rest comes from partnerships with other entities.
I lost a good employee in the probationary purge. He was doing well, learned quickly, and took on responsibilities he didn't have to. Once his probation ended in July 2025, we wanted to get him a promotion. Sending him that email saying he was being terminated for performance was a slap in the face to him and to those of us left in the organization. And it maybe saves the government $10,000/year as we are not fully funded by appropriations.
I understand that some people want to reduce the workforce, but this ham-handed way they are doing it is completely insane. There's no analysis, no comparison to work that HAS to be done because it's mandated by law. No method to it at all, except to break the government up completely and destroy the public's confidence.