The 20-Something DOGE Kid Who Showed Up at the IRS Demanding Everything

The Email That Landed on a Saturday Night

On the evening of February 22, 2025, every single federal employee in the United States received an email from what appeared to be an Office of Personnel Management HR address. Subject line: 'What did you do last week?' Deadline: Monday at midnight. Five bullet points, please. High importance.

Kathleen Walters, the chief privacy officer at the IRS, read it that Saturday night while also waiting to find out whether a lump her doctor had just found in her breast was cancerous. She had, by any reasonable measure, more important things to think about. But she understood immediately what this email meant for her agency, and it was not good.

Walters ran a staff of 650 people whose entire job was making sure that none of the IRS's 100,000 employees improperly accessed, leaked, or even casually glimpsed any of the 266 million tax returns the agency was then processing. That is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is a federal crime for an IRS employee to acknowledge, in writing, that a specific person has or has not filed a tax return. As The Guardian reports, Walters immediately started thinking about the army of well-meaning employees who might now type out detailed work summaries and inadvertently confess to a federal offense just to keep their jobs.

"People don't understand what the IRS does," she told The Guardian. She responded vaguely, kept it clean, and then spent the rest of her weekend trying to stop her subordinates from doing something they could get prosecuted for.

The Kid in the Lobby

Nine days before the email, on February 13, the IRS got its first visit. Security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the agency's human capital department, to say there was a kid in the lobby who said he needed to get in. His name was Gavin Kliger. According to The Guardian, Treasury had no record of him. The Office of Personnel Management had no idea what was happening. Nobody, in the entire chain of federal authority, could explain who this person was or why he was there.

So DiMartini had him escorted to her office. What walked in, per The Guardian's account, was a young man a few years out of college, dressed head to toe in black, who offered no smile and no eye contact and explained that he had come to root out fraud at the IRS. His backpack contained multiple government-issued phones and at least four laptops. He had somehow obtained badges granting him access to an extraordinary number of government buildings. He wanted an IRS phone, an IRS laptop, an IRS email address, full access to the agency's computer systems, and a meeting with the acting commissioner. Immediately.

He had, it eventually emerged, been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to something called DOGE. DiMartini had never, in nine years running human capital departments across multiple federal agencies, seen a political appointee simply materialize in a lobby and start demanding system access. "None of this is normal," she told The Guardian. She tried to be professional about it.

The Rules Are Not Optional, Sir

DiMartini explained to Kliger that before anyone works inside an IRS building, they have to pass a tax audit. He told her he did not need to do that. She told him yes, he did. He told her no, he didn't. She told him yes, he did. The Guardian reports this exchange went back and forth until Kliger finally gave in, at which point DiMartini explained the next step: mandatory briefings on ethics and taxpayer data privacy.

Kliger wanted access to the systems immediately, skipping all of it. He did not get it immediately. What he apparently did get, eventually, was enough bureaucratic patience worn down across enough federal agencies that DOGE operatives started gaining access to sensitive government data at a scale and speed that left career officials across Washington stunned and alarmed.

The Guardian's reporting, drawn from interviews with the federal workers who were actually in the room, makes clear that the IRS episode was not an isolated incident. It was a template. Young DOGE staffers, many with no government experience and less apparent concern for the legal frameworks protecting Americans' data, were dispatched to agencies across Washington with the same basic approach: show up, demand everything, act like the rules are someone else's problem.

What Was Actually at Stake

Let's be clear about what Kliger was demanding access to. The IRS at that moment was processing 266 million tax returns. Those returns contain Social Security numbers, bank account information, home addresses, income histories, and the kind of detailed financial biography that, in the wrong hands, is a gift to identity thieves, foreign intelligence services, and anyone who wants leverage over a specific American. The legal architecture protecting that data was not built by paranoid bureaucrats. It was built because the consequences of losing it are catastrophic and largely irreversible.

Kathleen Walters understood this. Her entire career was built around it. The Saturday night email had already created a situation where 100,000 IRS employees might inadvertently violate federal law trying to prove their productivity to an anonymous HR account. The arrival of a DOGE operative demanding immediate, unvetted system access was the same impulse at a larger scale: move fast, ignore the frameworks, sort out the wreckage later.

The Guardian's reporting is the first extended account from inside federal agencies of exactly how the DOGE disruption unfolded in practice, told from the perspective of the career officials who were there. Walters and DiMartini are not anonymous sources protecting their jobs. They are named, on record, describing what they witnessed.

A Prophet's Disciples Don't Ask Permission

The Guardian's headline pulls from something one DOGE staffer apparently said during this period: 'Elon is my prophet.' Whether meant sincerely or as a dark joke, it captures something real about the operation's internal culture. These were true believers, or at least they acted like them, moving with the confidence of people who thought the normal rules of institutional life were for lesser beings.

The federal workers who pushed back, like DiMartini insisting on the tax audit, or Walters trying to contain the damage from the Saturday email, were not obstructionists. They were doing exactly what their jobs required. The legal protections they were defending existed for the benefit of ordinary Americans, not the agencies themselves. Your tax return is private because Congress made it private, specifically because of what happens when it isn't.

The DOGE operation treated that legal architecture as an obstacle rather than a feature. The staffers dispatched to the IRS and other agencies were not sent to understand the systems. They were sent, as The Guardian's reporting makes plain, to disrupt them.