Elon Musk’s unconventional Department of Government Efficiency is certainly stirring the pot.

Musk’s most recent shot across the bow came via the Office of Personnel Management. It saw DOGE demanding emails from the entire federal workforce explaining their professional accomplishments over the past week. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk added with his usual tactlessness. The problem here is that Musk simply doesn’t understand how the complex federal bureaucracy works, and with this stunt, he may have overreached badly.

Multiple federal departments have told their employees not to respond to the OPM inquiry. Significantly, Tulsi Gabbard, the recently confirmed director of national intelligence, and brand-new FBI Director Kash Patel instructed their workforces to ignore Musk’s demand. Gabbard and Patel’s MAGA bona fides cannot be in doubt, but they understand security realities in a manner Musk and his DOGEniks do not. 

The OPM inquiry demanded that workers explain their accomplishments in an unclassified manner. That’s impossible for many intelligence community personnel, some of whom don’t even have unclassified job titles! Moreover, requiring IC personnel to respond to the OPM email detailing their work and position could put lives at risk for spies living undercover (which happens in reality, not just in movies). Knowing this, Gabbard and Patel had no choice but to nix DOGE’s ill-advised demand, with their employees grateful they did so, without delay. 

This affair raises basic questions about what Musk and his improvised DOGE understand about security and counterintelligence. Given the access to federal databases and internal information that DOGE is demanding, its personnel should be subject to usual security vetting. Musk is secretive about his organization, but the vetting of DOGE personnel appears to be rudimentary by normal federal standards to be charitable. It has been reported that Musk’s effort to bring one of his foreign national cronies into DOGE was cut short by the White House on security grounds. Who else made the cut? 

There was an online sensation last week when it was revealed that Musk’s wunderkind gaggle at DOGE included someone with distant KGB connections. Among the platoons of young IT assistants is 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a bright young man with a dubious hacking history encapsulated by his nerd nickname “Big Balls.” It turns out that Coristine’s grandfather was Valery Martynov, a KGB lieutenant colonel who volunteered to spy for United States intelligence in 1985. Unfortunately, he was unmasked by the CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames three years later. Martynov was executed for treason in 1987. 

This was somehow spun by online ignoramuses that Coristine was nebulously connected to Moscow when, in fact, his grandfather was clandestinely working for the U.S. rather than the Soviet Union. The villain in that counterespionage drama was Ames, who was arrested in 1994 and is still in federal prison for life at the age of 83.  

Nevertheless, key questions linger. Who is handling security vetting for DOGE? Is this process following established federal guidelines? Does DOGE have qualified security officers on staff to protect secrets, like any federal entity that handles classified material? The risk of grave national security compromise is real, although Musk and his entourage appear cavalierly unaware of it.

President Donald Trump inadvertently provided a relevant warning shortly after his reelection when he asserted that Musk and his team would deliver federal cutbacks and reforms that Republicans have wanted for decades. Moreover, the then-president-elect stated that DOGE “will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” That, of course, is a reference to the World War II top-secret development of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, ending the Pacific War with Japan’s capitulation.  

The Manhattan Project was a world-changing success that harnessed vast reservoirs of talent in science and engineering from all walks of life to develop nuclear weapons behind a wall of secrecy. Many of the brightest minds developing “the bomb” were young, true prodigies brought into the military-defense complex to make the project a reality. Analogies to DOGE are obvious. 

They are just as obvious when it comes to security. For all its science and engineering acumen, the Manhattan Project possessed lamentable physical and personnel security. In a rush to develop the atomic bomb, corners were cut regarding basic counterintelligence. Although Washington didn’t realize it until after World War II, thanks to an above-top-secret penetration of KGB codes and ciphers called VENONA by the National Security Agency, the Manhattan Project was Swiss-cheesed with Soviet spies. There was an entire ring of Soviet moles operating inside and adjacent to the Manhattan Project, and their theft and passing of U.S. nuclear secrets enabled Moscow to explode its first atomic bomb in 1949, years before U.S. intelligence assessed it would occur.  

The most infamous Soviet turncoats inside the Manhattan Project were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married communist couple who were executed in 1953 for their betrayal. Julius wasn’t just a longtime KGB operative but also a veteran agent handler who recruited several others, including relatives, to pass Manhattan Project secrets to the Kremlin. 

Perhaps the most relevant case of penetration of the Manhattan Project was Ted Hall, who was hired in 1944 at age 18, fresh after graduating with a physics degree from Harvard University. Hall was the youngest Manhattan Project staffer, regarded as one of the brightest young minds of his generation. However, Hall was also a communist sympathizer, and a few months after he joined the atomic bomb team, he volunteered to spy for Moscow. He passed to the KGB, which knew him by the cover name MLAD (YOUTH), top-secret U.S. information about how to construct a nuclear weapon. There was no more damaging Soviet mole inside the Manhattan Project than Ted Hall, who committed treason as a teenager.

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Hall got away with it. He went into academia. Six years after the war’s end, the FBI interviewed Hall, based on VENONA intelligence. But Hall stayed cool and denied any wrongdoing. Since VENONA was too highly classified to be admissible in court, there was nothing the FBI could do. Hall was never charged with any crime by the Justice Department. He eventually moved to the United Kingdom, where he worked as a scientist at Cambridge University while participating in left-wing political activism. Hall died in Britain in 1999 as a free man. 

Is there another Ted Hall lurking inside DOGE today? Moreover, is anyone looking for teenage turncoats in Musk’s improvised IT army? If the White House isn’t careful, DOGE may cause avoidable disasters as history repeats. 

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.