One outpost of the government’s more tech-savvy employees has developed into a growing pocket of dissent against President Trump and Elon Musk’s overhaul of Washington.
Workers at the Technology Transformation Services, the tech-focused arm of the General Services Administration, protested the deferred resignation program known as Fork in the Road this month by flooding internal communication channels with spoon emojis. This week, they have pushed back on a Trump appointee’s attempt to gain access to an internal database.
On Tuesday, one employee resigned in a message posted in a Slack channel with about 75 colleagues. He said he had been asked to grant Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer and the newly appointed head of the Technology Transformation Services, access to the Notify.gov database that is used by federal, state and local agencies to text the public about government services.
The worker said he saw it as a violation of his duties. He wrote that he believed that allowing access to Mr. Shedd could expose personal information of Americans, including phone numbers, according to a message seen by The New York Times and reported earlier by 404 media, the technology news website. Mr. Shedd could “download and store this data without anybody receiving a notification,” the employee wrote.
“I don’t believe that I can operate a program and system without the ability to manage access to PII,” he wrote, referring to personally identifiable information.
The employee’s resignation spurred an outcry on Slack among his colleagues. On Wednesday, they questioned why Mr. Shedd needed the access and why the worker had been asked to “disregard security processes,” according to messages seen by The Times. Another worker, who had shared the resigning employee’s departure note, had his Slack account deactivated, prompting fear among the staff that he had been removed from the communications platform out of retaliation, according to internal messages seen by The Times.
In a statement on Thursday, Will Powell, a spokesman for the General Services Administration, said that Mr. Shedd does not currently have access to Notify.gov.
“Mr. Shedd is working with all appropriate G.S.A. officials to ensure all established G.S.A. protocols and policies are followed before he is granted access to a T.T.S. system,” he said.
Mr. Shedd defended his request for access in a Slack message on Wednesday evening to employees, saying that it was to “ensure I have a detailed understanding of how the systems work.” He said he did not have administrative access “at this time” to the government database and added that he was dismayed by the leak of communications.
“Many messages intended for internal discussion but later leaked to external channels are only hurting the positioning and brand of T.T.S.,” he wrote in a message seen by The Times. “Moving forward, please keep conversations supportive and productive to avoid stirring up discontent and impacting T.T.S. in unintended ways.”
