A digital mutiny is brewing inside the Pentagon as nearly the entire staff of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) prepares to resign by the end of April. Their departure marks a dramatic fall from grace for a team once dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds.” The reason for the exodus? Elon Musk.
More specifically, it’s the rise of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the brainchild of President Trump’s second-term push to streamline the federal government and root out bureaucratic bloat. Since Musk took the reins of DOGE last year, the department has aggressively overhauled federal systems with automation, AI tools, and high-speed procurement reforms. Now, the same tech reformers who once held the Pentagon’s spotlight say they’ve been rendered obsolete.
Jennifer Hay, director of DDS, didn’t sugarcoat it in a recent interview with Politico: “The reason we stuck it out as long as we have is that we thought we were going to be called in,” she said. “The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly.”
And DOGE didn’t call them in. Instead, it swept past them—implementing cutting-edge, AI-driven solutions across multiple defense platforms without DDS’s input. The very agency built to inject Silicon Valley speed and smarts into the military was now considered too slow, too bureaucratic, and too redundant. As of now, all signs point to a complete shutdown of DDS by month’s end.
The Defense Digital Service was launched in 2015 under the Obama administration as a magnet for elite tech talent willing to do short-term tours of duty in the federal government. The team played key roles in standing up drone detection systems, building software tools for battlefield aid coordination, and managing emergency data transfers—most notably during the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and Ukraine’s defense efforts.
But in the last year, DOGE has rewritten the rules. With Musk leading the charge and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth executing on Trump’s vision, DOGE has reportedly eliminated multiple tech consulting contracts, fired duplicative managers, and centralized decision-making to accelerate results. That pace, say DDS insiders, left them in the dust.
“We were built to be the disruptors,” one former DDS staffer told The Daily Caller. “Now we’re the ones being disrupted.”
The situation highlights a broader theme inside the Trump administration: innovation by elimination. Trump and Musk have made no secret of their disdain for legacy bureaucracies that drain taxpayer dollars without delivering results. DOGE’s mission has been to find inefficiencies, cut through red tape, and deploy tech solutions that actually work.
And for the Pentagon, that meant scrapping sacred cows—including DDS.
Still, some national security experts worry about the fallout. “DDS wasn’t perfect, but they had proven experience in rapid deployment and crisis response,” said a former DOD official. “Replacing that institutional knowledge with an untested AI system might speed things up, but it also creates risks—especially in wartime situations.”
Hay and other departing staffers say they aren’t bitter, but they are disheartened. “We wanted to help,” she said. “We waited for the call. It never came.”
DOGE, for its part, has been quiet on the DDS resignations. But insiders suggest that the department views the shakeup as a necessary part of draining the swamp—this time, in cyberspace. By centralizing operations and building everything in-house with top-tier engineers recruited directly by Musk’s team, DOGE hopes to eliminate the need for legacy units like DDS altogether.
As for the tech community, reactions are mixed. Some former DDS alumni have taken to social media to express disappointment, calling the resignations a loss for innovation. Others, however, have praised DOGE for cutting dead weight and challenging the complacency that often comes with government work.
One senior official close to the restructuring put it bluntly: “The future of defense tech is not ten-year contracts and PowerPoints. It’s lines of code that work now. That’s what DOGE is delivering.”
Whether that gamble pays off remains to be seen. But one thing’s certain—at the Pentagon, the age of the “government nerd” is giving way to the age of the algorithm.
