The Chainsaw Sends a Job Offer
DOGE spent the last few months gutting federal agencies. Now it’s sending out job pitches to the very employees it fired.
Care to Join?
The email was unsigned.
The pitch was odd.
“I am reaching on behalf of the United States DOGE Service.”
That line alone would give most federal workers pause. Especially now. Especially after the year they’ve just lived through.
Because here is what that agency has done so far:
Pushed employees to take buyouts.
Demanded they churn out propaganda (“five things”).
Shut down entire programs overnight.
Engineered mass layoffs across dozens of departments.
Now, as if nothing had happened, DOGE was inviting some of those very same workers to interview for new roles.
One employee forced into retirement just months ago received the pitch. Another, still in their job, got a cold call after ignoring the email. A third simply said: “I would never.”
This is where we are. The Department of Government Efficiency — a name that already carries the stale whiff of dystopian branding — is not just reshaping federal institutions by force. It is now trying to staff them with the compliant and the willing. Or perhaps just the desperate.
The polite term is “recruiting.”
The accurate term might be “co-opting.”
When DOGE first burst onto the scene, led by Elon Musk with a chainsaw literally hoisted on stage at CPAC, the imagery wasn’t subtle. The point wasn’t subtle. This was to be a purge.
The Trump administration’s message was simple: the permanent bureaucracy was the problem. Not incompetence or corruption at the top. Not failed leadership or hollowed-out governance. The problem was the career professionals who still believed in doing their jobs.
And so DOGE was created to “fix” the federal government the only way this administration knows how — through destruction first, efficiency later (if ever).
Now the same outfit is sending emails, asking those it battered to come work under its banner. Why? Because the purge went too far. Because the backlash was real. Because you can’t run a government on vibes and ideologues alone.
DOGE is trying to backfill its own damage.
This new recruiting effort is strange even on its own terms.
The emails aren’t coming through official USAJobs postings. They are being sent to individuals whose resumes were harvested through a vague opt-in process. No clear point of contact is given. No transparency about how the recipients were selected.
One of the positions being advertised? An “ethics agency advisor” who will also oversee the agency’s FOIA requests. That is, the same FOIA requests DOGE is currently fighting in court to avoid answering.
You can’t make this up.
The irony of it all wasn’t lost on a former federal HR officer, who noted that the process violates basic norms of government hiring. It is being run out of a shadow HR process. It is targeting specific individuals based on unclear criteria. And it is happening after DOGE eliminated much of the existing talent in the U.S. Digital Service it replaced.
The most generous interpretation is that DOGE is scrambling. It gutted agencies, then discovered that governing still requires expertise. The less generous interpretation is that this is another phase of the same project: bringing in handpicked staff to replace those who refused to play along.
In either case, the through-line is not hard to see.
Elaine Kamarck, who ran the Clinton-era government reform initiative, understands the playbook. Reforming government requires insiders. You need people who know the machinery if you want to improve it.
But, as she put it, DOGE has a “trust problem.” You don’t wield a chainsaw on stage, signal your hostility to the entire career civil service, then expect those same professionals to line up for job offers.
This is what happens when you treat government as an enemy to be subdued rather than an institution to be reformed. You find yourself in a hollowed-out building, surrounded by loyalists and sycophants, trying to hire back the very people you drove out. And finding that they want no part of it.
The Trump administration says DOGE will now be “institutionalized,” with permanent funding and 150 full-time employees across agencies. But an institutionalized purge is still a purge. The damage is already done. The trust is already broken.
What’s left is a strange kind of theater. An agency pretending to build, after having spent the year tearing down. An outreach email landing in inboxes that read like gallows humor to those who received them.
“I don’t have many feelings about this,” one employee said. “Other than being surprised by the cold call, which suggested to me they are having trouble recruiting people via normal channels.”
Translation: the system still works. Not the government system, which is bleeding talent and capacity. The human system. The instinct to say no when asked to serve something that no longer deserves your service.
Sometimes the smallest story reveals the deepest rot.
A government that fires its experts, then begs them to return.
An “ethics advisor” recruited by an agency fighting ethics complaints.
An efficiency drive run by people who can’t manage a hiring process.
There are many ways to measure decline. One is the absurdity of the emails you start getting.