'Empty suit providing cover': Acting DOGE chief buried over ducking blame for mass layoffs

08 April

Amy Gleason — who President Donald Trump's administration has named as the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — insists that she isn't responsible for the mass firings of thousands of federal employees carried out as part of DOGE's mission.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday that Gleason — who is a healthcare technology executive — distanced herself from DOGE's layoffs of tens of thousands of government workers during a conversation with other healthcare professionals. According to the Chronicle, Gleason was responding in a group text thread made up of people from the U.S. healthcare industry upset with her over the mass firings within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

"Each agency has built its own internal DOGE team per the executive order. Those employees work closely with senior leaders, but the decisions are made by agency leadership themselves," Gleason wrote. "Agency heads and their teams are the only ones who can hire or fire people."

Gleason reportedly complained that news coverage surrounding her role in the administration was "confusing" and "written to sensationalize rather than clarify." She emphasized that as head of the U.S. DOGE Service (formerly the U.S. Digital Service, where Gleason was a senior advisor), she was "separate" from "embedded agency DOGE teams." But critics didn't buy Gleason's argument, and used her remarks to highlight how little the public still knows about the quasi-agency.

"The only way that’s true and can be true is for [Gleason] to say that she is an empty suit providing cover for what is being done in the name of DOGE," Robert Weissman, who is co-president of consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen told the Chronicle. "DOGE is doing those things. She is in charge of one part of DOGE — one manifestation of DOGE. How she thinks she’s not morally responsible for what DOGE is doing would be beyond me."

Additionally, Nikhel Sus — who is deputy chief counsel for the anti-corruption group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — said Gleason's statements add to the bevy of "incomplete disclosures, inconsistent statements and partial statements" about DOGE and Gleason's specific responsibilities. Sus told the Chronicle that his group is "still trying to get answers to very basic questions that really any government agency should be proactively disclosing."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in February that Gleason had been acting administrator of DOGE for "quite some time," which caught reporters by surprise — particularly because DOGE was founded by both tech magnate Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. The announcement also apparently caught Gleason off-guard, as she was in Mexico on vacation at the time her role was announced.

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