Washington Post [no paywall] Depositions offer insight into what Elon Musk’s group was up to. Members describe a club-like atmosphere in which they slashed agencies with little oversight. Members of the U.S. DOGE Service spoke regularly over Signal, the encrypted chat service that can auto-delete messages. They were informally recruited by people they knew. And other government employees didn’t know who was “DOGE.” When DOGE members were deposed in January as part of a lawsuit over cuts to grants awarded to the National Endowment for the Humanities, they described a vague network of similarly minded technologists and lawyers who had been tasked with a vast mandate to reduce federal spending. They also described a lack of structure that allowed them to operate with little oversight or understanding of what others might be doing. A year after Elon Musk brought in a cohort of allies from Silicon Valley to remake the government, through a newly established Department of Government Efficiency, lawsuits and public record releases have steadily begun shedding light on who was in DOGE and how its members approached their roles. The depositions, in a lawsuit over DOGE using ChatGPT to propose cuts to about 1,400 humanities grants, have answered some questions about how the group — which is not part of the Cabinet — formed and operated with little scrutiny. In one moment that went viral, Fox was asked why he described a documentary about female Holocaust victims as “inherently discriminatory” and sought to cut off its federal funding. In another, his colleague Nathan Cavanaugh acknowledged that DOGE did not reduce the federal deficit. The disclosures have confirmed news coverage from last year about the extent of DOGE cuts and identified several key DOGE figures operating in federal agencies. For instance, in January, the Department of Energy responded to liberal watchdog group American Oversight’s requests for the names and titles of members of its DOGE team, acknowledging one previously unnamed member: Alexander Glaubach, a former tech investor, who has since launched an artificial intelligence start-up. In response to one of the lawsuits, the government shared two lists of 188 people whom it identified as being part of DOGE, including career civil servants at the former U.S. Digital Service and contractors at an HR firm. The lists excluded at least 19 DOGE members whom The Washington Post previously identified, according to an analysis of records…”