Photo: Jason C. Andrew/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, in October 2022, he warned his remaining employees that they would need to be “extremely hardcore.” What this ultimately looked like was transforming the social-media company’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco into what former employees dubbed “Twitter Hotel,” with staff crashing on sofas that had been outfitted with sheets and blankets or bringing in their sleeping bags and eye masks so they could make their deadlines. For Musk’s Trump-backed DOGE army, life it turns out hasn’t been much different.
As the billionaire and his true believers work to slash $2 trillion in federal spending by axing agency contracts and firing so many public-sector employees they’ve potentially pushed layoffs to the highest point since the early days of the pandemic, DOGE staffers have turned the neoclassical General Services Administration office building in downtown Washington into a de facto dorm. Per Politico, DOGE operatives have decked out four rooms on the building’s sixth floor with Ikea beds, lamps, and dressers. Reporters there also obtained a photo showing, bleakly, a room that was converted into a play area, complete with a stuffed animal and toys.
This is typical Musk. At a New York investment conference last year, he shared that his “primary residences” for three years were Tesla factories in California and Nevada and insisted in a 2022 interview he slept on the factory floor during more hectic times to show staff he wasn’t “drinking mai tais on a tropical island.” (Musk claims he is also sleeping at the DOGE offices, though bragged at a black-tie dinner hosted by the Alfalfa Club in January that he was invited to sleep in the enormous rosewood bed in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom, according to Wired.)
So how is sleeping at work serving Musk and his team? So far, DOGE employees have screwed up their calculations on how much they have saved in government spending to the tune of billions of dollars and have been forced to bring back a number of federal employees fired in mass layoffs, including hundreds of nuclear-weapons employees as well as officials who were working on the government’s efforts to deal with the bird flu.
And as was the case with Twitter, it’s not entirely clear DOGE staffers are allowed to turn federal offices into their own crash pads. A GSA bulletin put out in 2019 warns, “Sleeping in buildings under the jurisdiction, custody or control of GSA … is prohibited, except when expressly authorized by an agency official.” Ethics experts, meanwhile, see malicious intent: “I can’t even imagine what the purpose is, other than to terrorize the civilian workforce,” author and politician Jeff Nesbit told Politico.
A GSA spokesperson defended the setup, insisting to the outlet that “government employees are working incredibly hard and long hours to help reduce the federal deficit and ensure an effective government” and that the move has, in fact, been green-lit by an agency official. Also, they seem to take employees’ hygiene seriously: According to a February invoice obtained by Politico, the agency is weighing a $25,000 investment to install a washer and dryer.