Before DOGE came along, Jonathan Kamens worked on cybersecurity for the VA. Now, he says in an interview with Jacobin, he dreads an avalanche of scams against veterans — and hopes his former coworkers will push back.
It seems no federal agency is safe from Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — not even DOGE itself.
Two Fridays ago, roughly fifty people were fired from the department, which used to be known as the US Digital Service (USDS) and was, prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration, responsible for working on government-related tech projects: making sure government websites were working well and safe from hackers, for instance. In one case, USDS streamlined and modernized the Social Security Administration’s digital presence to the tune of $285 million worth of taxpayer savings.
One of those fired USDS workers was Jonathan Kamens, a cybersecurity specialist who had worked within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on its digital infrastructure, and who wants to use his story to raise the alarm among the public and galvanize federal workers into resisting DOGE. Kamens spoke to Jacobin magazine’s Branko Marcetic last week.
- Branko Marcetic
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How and why did you join the USDS?
- Jonathan Kamens
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I was originally a software engineer for thirty-five years, working for start-ups in the Boston area. I was looking at what was going on in the world, with Trump and the pandemic and climate change and everything else, and I thought, I have to find something I can do with my skills that isn’t just making money for venture capitalists and makes a difference, something meaningful with a mission. I was on [the social media platform] Mastodon one day, and someone at USDS said, “We’re always hiring, take a look.”
What sealed the deal for me that this was where I wanted to work was when I did my second interview with one of the engineers, and he said the project he had worked on was building a data pipeline for Afghan translators who had assisted US troops, to help get them out of Afghanistan once the Taliban took over. I don’t think you can get more mission-driven than saving people’s lives on a daily basis.
So I was hired in June 2023 and was at the VA, overseeing cybersecurity for the va.gov website. There were a number of contractors on the team who help handle security and compliance, but on the oversight side, overseeing them and their work, the only engineer or really knowledgeable cybersecurity professional was me. Now they’ve fired me, so there’s nobody in that role.
- Branko Marcetic
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What importance did your role serve the VA?
- Jonathan Kamens
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Part of it was developing and implementing and monitoring security policies for the entire organization. In the time I was there, I identified a number of different issues where we were just not doing things right. We weren’t doing our access reviews thoroughly or frequently enough. We weren’t being careful where private and personal information was being stored. It was my job to identify those gaps and figure out the correct way for us to solve them.
Another part of it was helping evaluate new architecture and functionality that gets deployed to make sure it’s secure. Every single project that got built for va.gov has to go through an architecture review process that I helped create. One of the pieces of it is, let’s talk about the security of this new app you’re building: Are you storing this data in the right place? Are you encrypting your data right? Have you thought about denial-of-service attacks? Have you thought about potential vulnerabilities? How are you doing authentication?
You really need to be an engineer to dig down into that stuff. That’s one of the reasons I’m worried about being fired, because there’s really no one else on the team who has the depth and breadth of knowledge, both in engineering and security, who’s going to be able to keep doing that work.
- Branko Marcetic
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What does that mean for veterans or the average American?
- Jonathan Kamens
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As of the day I left, they started from the position that the system had relatively good security. But without the manpower to maintain that level of security, it will gradually deteriorate over time.
That’s inevitable, because they won’t be able to replace me: firstly, because no one in the private sector wants to work for the federal government right now; second, because there’s this executive order that you can’t hire anyone new until you fire four other people first. But they can’t fire any more people — they’re all overworked as it is. Every single person I worked with in government was asked to do more with less. They’re going to do the best they can at security with people they have.
If the security of the system deteriorates, at some point there’s going to be a serious security threat. That’s why you’re always working on it — threats are always evolving, and you have to evolve too. That could mean someone getting access to veterans’ direct deposit information or their private health information. If I’m a veteran using the VA for primary care being treated for erectile dysfunction, a bad actor could get this info and extort me. Or what if you’re a veteran using the VA for therapy? Maybe you say something to your therapist that could become a problem for your military career if it became public — if they steal your therapy notes, which are accessible through the VA, you could be blackmailed.
There are all kinds of scams that can be done with this data. It’s kind of inevitable.
- Branko Marcetic
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How common are these kinds of threats?
- Jonathan Kamens
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The biggest risk for va.gov is that a large number of people have access to production data, and there is not good monitoring in place for what data they are accessing and what they’re doing with it. I was just getting traction on solving this problem, but I have no idea if anyone’s going to pick up that project.
What we’re seeing with the DOGE people is that when you have people who shouldn’t have access to data who are given access to data, they can do a lot of damage. Over the coming years as the culture changes, I would be concerned about who they are giving data to and what monitoring they have in place.
- Branko Marcetic
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What do you mean?
- Jonathan Kamens
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My concern is someone on the inside deciding that they’ll steal a big corpus of private personal data from veterans and then figure out how to make a buck off it: sell it on the dark web, sell it to Russia, China, North Korea. The other concern I have is someone getting a job at VA or a VA contractor for the purpose of obtaining data at someone’s request by specific people.
There are a lot of veterans who serve government in different positions. Some of them have private data in va.gov, which they would not want to be made public. If you are an enemy of the state that wants to damage the United States, one way to do that would be to access it and blackmail specific people you are targeting to do what you want. Without adequate controls over access of data, it seems plausible to me — plausible enough that I worry about what we can do to prevent it — that someone could be assigned by a nation-state actor to penetrate the VA to get access to data, and then to do queries and lookups about specific people.
- Branko Marcetic
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Did you see inappropriate data access happening when you were there?
- Jonathan Kamens
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The secretary of the VA made a video to reassure us that DOGE people are only looking at contracts, not databases, and we shouldn’t worry. But I find that implausible. The DOGE people say they’re looking for fraud, to save money, and the single biggest budget line item for VA is the benefits they pay to veterans, and that is a significant budget line item for the federal government generally. It is implausible to me that the DOGE people, in looking for fraud, are not going to want to explore the data and records to see if they can identify it.
And I don’t think they are trustworthy people. They haven’t undergone background checks, which you are meant to do when you work for the VA. Every access of those DOGE people is a violation of VA policy. This guy “Big Balls,” we know for a fact wouldn’t have passed a background check if one was done.
They’re rummaging around those databases, and that means they have access to names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers — wouldn’t an identity thief like to get access to that information? Some of the data we store at the VA is just as sensitive, including medical records.
- Branko Marcetic
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What was the mood among your coworkers regarding Trump’s win? Were people expecting him to embark on this program of mass firing?
- Jonathan Kamens
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I started job hunting the day after the election. My take was that we were all fucked, that terrible things were going to happen, and I thought it was exceedingly unlikely that USDS would survive. A small number of people saw things as clearly as I did. There was a much larger number who were either in denial or chose to be optimistic about the possibilities of what was coming. I literally had people tell me in conversations between the election and the inauguration that I was depressing them and I should stop talking to them about what I was worried was going to happen.
I didn’t even expect Trump or Musk to do things so bad and so fast. What has happened has gone beyond even my imagination of what was going to happen, and I was dreading some serious stuff. They’re doing what they said they were going to do, just really fast, and the worst version of everything.
People’s moods plunged within hours of the inauguration. When he started signing executive orders, it made things click for people. The number of optimists who I worked with had gone down dramatically between the inauguration and when I was fired.
- Branko Marcetic
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Walk me through when DOGE came in.
- Jonathan Kamens
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I’m a remote worker in Boston. My understanding is one DOGE guy was brought in to the VA, Justin Fulcher. For a long time, he was the only one. He was just talking to people — wasn’t accessing any of the VA systems or digging around in any of the databases.
People thought they were positive conversations, and that he was serious about trying to improve the technology for the VA, because he’s a tech founder, a software engineer. People I heard from liked him and thought he was going to help the office of the chief technology officer (CTO) get more people so they could build better technology.
Before the inauguration, the Trump transition team had several meetings with USDS leadership. The leadership came back to the staff and reported to us that they thought those meetings went very well, that the Trump transition team was very interested in USDS, and they thought that was a good sign. When they said that, sirens were going off in my head, because if they’re interested in you, that means they figured out what they can use you for, and it’s not going to be good. And that is indeed what happened. What they wanted the USDS for was as a vehicle to get Musk and his droogs into the White House.
Justin Fulcher, maybe unknowingly, I think was doing the same thing at the VA. He was trying to convince people, “I’m here to help, you don’t have to be afraid of me, I’m going to help you do your jobs.” I would love to be proven wrong. If DOGE comes to the VA next week, to the office of the CTO where I work, and says, “We’re going to let you increase the size of your team, the security guy we just fired, we’re going to let you hire a replacement for him, we understand the work you do is important” — if that actually happened, I would be overjoyed. But it’s not what has happened anywhere else.
- Branko Marcetic
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Did many people take the “fork in the road” buyout?
- Jonathan Kamens
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A few USDSers took it, but not many. I and my colleagues didn’t take it because we believed in the work we were doing and wanted to keep doing it.
- Branko Marcetic
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Tell me about the recent mass firing of fifty people at USDS.
- Jonathan Kamens
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When DOGE came into USDS, they didn’t really integrate with us. They were set up alongside us. We weren’t working with them or communicating with them, they were just doing what they were doing. The “USDS classic” people, the ones around before the inauguration, kept working on projects. There were a lot of questions — “Do we have to move to Washington?,” the terms of the fork in the road deal — but we got no answers from DOGE.
USDS has a number of different divisions, which we call “communities of practice.” There’s product design, procurement, talent, and engineering, which is the biggest community of practice. But I was the only engineer who was fired. I suspect it was for political reasons, as I was doing anti-DOGE organizing. There was a rally outside Health and Human Services that was held on Valentine’s Day morning. I was helping the people organizing the rally and sent an email to a mailing list of current and former USDS people that’s sufficiently public, even if it’s a closed list, that it was probably leaked. It was a risk I took that I thought was worth taking.
We are trying to get earned media, trying to get the stories of people who were fired and get those published. The overarching idea is that we want to encourage federal workers to start resisting what DOGE is doing, because we believe what DOGE is doing is illegal. Federal workers who are asked to do things by DOGE are within their rights, and it’s even a requirement of their jobs, to say no and push back. We haven’t seen enough of that.
- Branko Marcetic
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Among those who are left, do you have a sense of the mood?
- Jonathan Kamens
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The people at USDS are very dedicated to the work, and the majority of people I am interacting with there are interested in staying there. I’m sure there are some people who are job hunting. But I think for the majority of people at the agency, the mood is funereal. Everyone is depressed and worried their projects will be shut down. But as long as people can keep doing the work, they’ll keep doing the work.
If the VA called me up and said, “We made a mistake when we fired you, we want you back,” I would go back. Despite all the chaos and risk of doing that, the mission is still there. I got into this work because I believe in the mission.
- Branko Marcetic
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What is your plan for the future? Are you financially secure?
- Jonathan Kamens
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I’m trying to use what happened to me to make people realize how serious what’s happening is across the government, and I feel like I have a couple of weeks to leverage what happened to me to do that. And then I will go back to my normal life.
I am job hunting. I am the primary wage earner for my family and we have five kids. We are not wealthy. As it happened, coincidentally, a few months ago, a start-up I worked for got bought up, and I had stock, and that’s enough for about three or four months of living expenses. If I don’t have a job after that, then it’ll be a problem. I’m not blaming the government for putting me in dire straits; I’m blaming the government for destroying the government.