Pentagon’s ‘SWAT team of nerds’ resigns en masse
Under pressure from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, nearly all the staff of the Defense Digital Service — the Pentagon’s fast-track tech development arm — are resigning over the coming month, according to the director and three other current members of the office, granted anonymity to discuss their job status freely, as well as internal emails.
The resignations will effectively shut down the decade-old program after the end of April.
The Defense Digital Service was created in 2015 to help the Pentagon adopt fast tech fixes during national security crises and push Silicon Valley-style innovation inside the Pentagon. It built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid, drone detection technologies and more.
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Without the program, some key efforts to streamline the DOD’s tech talent pipeline and counter adversarial drones will be sunsetted, one soon-to-be former employee said.
Once dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” DDS was one of the department’s earliest efforts to inject Silicon Valley ethos into its massive bureaucracy.
Jennifer Hay, director of the 14-person office, plans to leave by May 1. Eleven other employees plan to take President Donald Trump’s deferred resignation package by then. The two remaining staffers are also leaving.
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