Top Officials Placed on Leave After Denying DOGE Access to Federal Payroll Systems
Top career officials at the Department of the Interior (DOI) were placed on administrative leave late last week after declining to immediately give affiliates of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) levels of access to a payroll system that would in theory allow them to, among other things, stop individual Supreme Court justices' paychecks.
The New York Times has reported that these officials include DOI's chief information and information security officers; sources tell WIRED they also include a top lawyer.
For several weeks, say sources with direct knowledge of the situation, DOGE operatives have been seeking what they termed 'full' or 'system' access to DOI's payroll, human resources, and credentialing systems. Among the systems to which it demanded full access is the Federal Personnel and Payroll System (FPPS), which is housed in DOI's Interior Business Center and used by dozens of federal agencies ranging from the Department of Justice to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to handle payroll and records associated with more than 275,000 federal workers, including at agencies outside the executive branch.
The DOGE associates in question are Tyler Hassen, an energy executive and acting assistant secretary of policy, management, and budget at DOI; Stephanie Holmes, who runs HR for DOGE and is the acting chief human capital officer at DOI; and Katrine Trampe, an adviser to Doug Burgum, the secretary of the Interior.
According to sources with direct knowledge, when asked why they sought full access to these systems, the DOGE operatives said they specifically sought levels of permissions that would give them the ability to create, pause, and delete email accounts. This functionality doesn't, strictly speaking, exist for any one user within the systems they were seeking to access because such actions are, as a security measure, designed to be initiated by one person and approved by another. Granting their request would thus require them each to be given an essentially God-mode level of access to the entire system architecture.
According to sources and a risk assessment memorandum reviewed by WIRED and first reported on by the Times, top career officials saw several issues with granting these unprecedented levels of access.
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