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DOGE IS HIRING. THE RESPONSE DID NOT DISAPPOINT  
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Rivera Sun
February 10, 2025
Waging Nonviolence
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_ DOGE’s hiring site has become a focal point for cathartic and
even strategic outrage, underscoring the important role humor and
rebellious defiance play in bleak times. _

Protesters rally outside of the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building
headquarters of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on February
05, 2025 in Washington, DC. The group of federal employees and
supporters are protesting against Elon Musk, tech billio, Alex
Wong/Getty Images)

 

This week, word got out that the Department of Government Efficiency,
or DOGE, was looking to hire
[[link removed]]
“world-class talent to work long hours identifying/eliminating
waste, fraud and abuse.” 

It turns out that people had a _lot _of ideas about who should apply
for those jobs.

Elon Musk and his team of 19-24 year old tech minions have been
bulldozing through federal agencies, hacking into sensitive data,
shutting down USAID, threatening federal workers with termination, and
a host of other illegal and questionable activities. Protests
[[link removed]] against
Musk and DOGE erupted in cities nationwide.

Now, the hiring site join.doge.gov [[link removed]] has become
a focal point for the outrage as people submit mock applications. 

Hitler
[[link removed]],
Mussolini and Franco all “submitted” applications. One comment
quipped “There’s a lot of out-of-work fascists since WWII.”
Under qualifications, their applications mentioned things like “good
at getting rid of bureaucratic red tape” and “leader in downsizing
populations.”

Cruella De Vil
[[link removed]]
(using the email [email protected]) let Musk know
that she has experience in breaking up Black/white relationships,
views DOG(E)s as part of her brand, and has conducted round-ups
before. Ebenezer Scrooge
[[link removed]],
though ineligible for being a British citizen, nonetheless lauded his
world-famous “penny-pinching” and “ruthless cost-saving
measures” and “willingness to work on holidays.” The Grinch
wrote
[[link removed]],
“I stole Christmas. What more do you need?”

At one point, the website threw up blocks
[[link removed]]
to prevent online attacks. It’s back now (in case you were
wondering).

This flood of spam comments and fake responses to the DOGE hiring site
is one of many similar campaigns aiming to overwhelm hotlines and
emails. 

A Missouri government tip site
[[link removed]]
for submitting complaints about gender-affirming care was taken down
after people overwhelmed it with rambling anecdotes and the “Bee
Movie” script.

Similar protest emails have been sent to the Office of Personnel
Management, or OPM, which is trying to get reports of noncompliance
with their anti-trans efforts. Sending messages to
[email protected], people are attempting to use a flood of
complaints to prevent snitching from targeting federal workers
upholding trans inclusion.

After the Trump administration warned federal employees of “adverse
consequences” for not reporting colleagues resisting orders to
eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, citizens
[[link removed]]
began submitting false reports to the special email account:
[email protected]. Here’s one example: “A man named Donald Trump
is doing affirmative action for billionaires and oligarchs against the
mandate to stop hiring minority groups.”

Another campaign has been emailing the DOGE Caucus and suggesting that
they cut the military budget or SpaceX contracts instead. (DOGE itself
has no publicly available emails, but people can contact this pro-DOGE
group at: [email protected])

The tactic of spamming websites, emails and hotlines tries to render
them inoperable, or at least inconvenient, to those trying to use them
to report or repress resistance. These kind of tactics have been used
numerous times, often to great success. In 2021, Reddit users
supported striking Kellogg’s workers by crashing the scab hiring
website
[[link removed]].
In 2022, a teen coded a program to help other teens spam a tip line
for reporting critical race theory
[[link removed]] being taught in
schools. In 2024, Utah
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and Indiana’ [[link removed]]s
snitch lines on bathroom accessibility was overwhelmed with hoax
reports.

Humor and rebellious defiance play an important role in these bleak
times. The fake applications aren’t just about jamming up the
system. They’re returning a sense of agency to people, affirming
their humanity and unleashing a bit of much-needed laughter. 

Around 2000, when the student-led resistance group Otpor! sought to
oust the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic
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they used a series of humorous pranks to build momentum and break
through fear of the regime’s repression. For example, they would
paste a photo of Milosevic’s face on a metal barrel, place it in the
street and wallop it with a baseball bat. When people came running at
the noise, they’d hand them the bat and say, “Sick of the
dictator? Bang on the can.” That would bring more people, which
would make more noise, which would build more interest in the movement
to ultimately oust him. Otpor! grew from 12 students to 70,000 in two
years and succeeded in kicking Milosevic out of power. 

Humorous resistance tactics empower people through their mischievous,
rebellious defiance of unjust laws and policies. Whether they succeed
in crashing the hotline or not, they achieve the secondary goal of
catalyzing people’s spirit of resistance. This was true even for a
satirical post whose rumors outstripped its reality. The satirical
post [[link removed]] claimed that
the ICE Hotline had been taken down after 90 percent of the calls were
reporting Elon Musk. Even if untrue, it was uplifting to imagine. And
who knows? Maybe this piece of speculative fiction will actualize into
reality. As Snopes
[[link removed]] reported: “The
rumor was presumably in reference to a phone number (1-866-DHS-2-ICE)
for people ‘to report suspicious activity’ that’s listed on the
header of the agency’s website.”

In the early days of Trump’s second presidency, when paralyzing fear
and despair gripped many in a state of shocked immobilization, the
effort to flood snitch lines broke through that reaction. It helped
people tap into their defiance, laugh and unleash the sense of
rebellious mischief that energizes a movement. 

Where ordinary protests in the streets sometimes feel like they’re
either falling on deaf ears or preaching to the choir, creative
tactics like these are fostering a sense of solidarity and connection
as the social posts circulate. They’re breaking people out of
passivity with a relatively risk-free action that has a practical
strategic purpose. And they’re lifting our spirits, too.

Even greater strength can be found in turning a small, plucky act of
rebellion into a mass movement to hamper this administration at every
turn. Dispersed, widespread acts of small or large scale “gumming
up” of an opponent’s ability to operate has a long history, one
that predates the Internet. The World War II “Simple Sabotage
Manual” — once classified and now available online at
Gutenberg.org
[[link removed]] —
has been circulating widely in recent months. It includes tactics for
hindering a hostile occupation regime, including stalling meetings
with long speeches
[[link removed]],
bringing up irrelevant points and haggling over small details. Other
tactics include “misunderstanding” orders, delaying as long as
possible and sending supplies to the wrong place. In Nazi-occupied
Denmark [[link removed]],
such strategies were so effective that despite being controlled by the
Nazis for several years, the Danish shipyards never completed building
a single warship for Germany. 

In the United States today, there’s a growing call for federal
workers, civil servants, politicians, citizens and residents to resist
wherever they can — even if the action can only stall the
administration for a little while. We saw that in the U.S.
Treasury’s acting deputy secretary
[[link removed]],
who resigned after trying to prevent the DOGE team’s demand for
server access. USAID security chiefs
[[link removed]]
who tried to prevent Elon Musk from accessing sensitive information
were placed on leave, but not before alerting the public to what was
happening. The Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub
[[link removed]]
refused to resign when Trump fired her, saying “Received a letter
from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner & Chair.
There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners — this isn’t
it.” USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong
[[link removed]]
also refused to resign her post and forced the administration to send
security officers to escort her from the building.

School districts
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are refusing to let ICE enter or to enforce anti-trans policies.
Cities are declaring themselves sanctuary cities for migrants and
LGBTQ+ persons
[[link removed]]. Some
businesses are upholding DEIA policies
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in the face of federal threats of prosecution
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States are in open defiance to the federal government over the
executive orders on DEIA, climate and trans issues
[[link removed]]. 

Stalling, slowing, hampering, hindering actions can have a cumulative
effect that adds up and wears down the opponent. Not all campaigns
succeed in full, but each throws a little more grit into the machinery
of hate and destruction. 

It adds up. It slows them down. It gives the movement time to
organize. There are countless ways to participate in these
calls-to-action. Who will apply to DOGE next?

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun [[link removed]] has written
numerous books and novels, including "The Dandelion Insurrection
[[link removed]]" and the award-winning Ari
Ara Series [[link removed]]. She is the
editor of Nonviolence News [[link removed]] and the
Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence [[link removed]].
Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds
of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the board of Backbone
Campaign [[link removed]] and the advisory board of
World BEYOND War [[link removed]].

* DOGE; Trump Administration; Protests; Sabotage;
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