What 1,000 pages of documents tell us about DOGE

Months after staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency were found in the Federal Communications Commission directory, the FCC is being accused of slow-walking demands for information about what they did there.

On February 24th, advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burleigh filed a public records request to the FCC, seeking details about DOGE’s activities and whether they created conflicts of interest with DOGE creator Elon Musk. But the FCC has so far produced largely useless documentation that creates more questions than answers. Now, DOGE’s role is among the many topics FCC Chair Brendan Carr could face during a highly anticipated oversight hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

Frequency Forward and Burleigh asked in their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all documents related to DOGE personnel accessing FCC data or records, meetings between DOGE and FCC staff, onboarding of DOGE employees, and travel by Carr to any entities related to Musk. They hoped to uncover potential conflicts of interest created by embedding DOGE in an agency that regulates one of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, as well as its competitors. They wanted to know if DOGE was accessing sensitive systems and information, as well as how its work impacted the FCC, whose functions include approving many electronic devices and managing spectrum.

But the agency has produced little that casts light on DOGE’s operations. It has released 1,079 pages of documents, nearly all of them within the past few weeks, comprised mainly of spreadsheets, an ethics manual, and an already public FCC order. The FCC says it is still processing 900 pages that include records it needs to consult with other agencies about before releasing. The FCC did not respond to a request for comment on the FOIA battle or the DOGE staffers.

While delays may have been exacerbated by the 43-day government shutdown, Frequency Forward and Burleigh have accused the FCC of “acting in bad faith” and “intentionally seeking to delay” court proceedings. The FCC has denied that’s the case in court filings. The group sued the FCC on April 24th, alleging a breach of the FOIA laws, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ordered the agency to make its final production by January 16th, 2026. After that, it must detail the reasons it could not release the remaining documents, giving Frequency Forward a chance to argue for their publication.

“The documents that have been produced so far are interesting not so much in what they show, but in what they don’t show,” says Arthur Belendiuk, an attorney carrying out the FOIA case against the FCC and a former employee at the agency. They include relatively limited information about what DOGE staffers were working on, what systems they had access to, and which of them were even fully onboarded.

The pages produced so far include resumes, financial disclosure forms, and emails from DOGE employees who The Verge first reported were listed in the FCC directory: Tarak Makecha, Jordan Wick, and Jacob Altik. (Makecha was technically on loan from the Office of Personnel Management, according to the emails.) All three remain listed in the public directory with FCC emails as of Tuesday, though depending on their start dates, their expected 120-day terms at the agency have likely already expired.

A March email describes Makecha as a software engineer from OPM, Wick as a software engineer from DOGE, and Altik as an attorney from DOGE. In letters to the FCC’s general counsel, Makecha and Wick propose “to provide support, expertise, and guidance” on FCC operations and IT systems and to help improve “efficiency, transparency, and responsibility.” In a March 18th email, the FCC’s chief of staff Scott Delacourt gave permission for FCC employees to “discuss non-public information with the DOGE team.” Also in March, FCC employees helped arrange a meeting between the DOGE staffers and Carr at the FCC.

The documents shed some light on a claim Carr made in an April 30th letter to Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-WA), where he claimed that only two people from DOGE had joined the FCC. In an April email chain discussing a request for comment from The Verge about the DOGE directory listings, Carr’s chief of staff, Greg Watson, wrote that he was “under the impression” that Altik was “never fully on-boarded.” Following a redacted response from another FCC staffer, he wrote that he agreed with “the recommendation to ignore,” and The Verge never got a response to that request. A response from Carr to his staff regarding the email containing The Verge’s request, along with two unrelated press requests, is redacted.

However, it remains unclear how far Altik, a lawyer who was selected to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch before joining DOGE, made it through the onboarding process. In the documents released so far, there’s neither any clear indication that Altik’s hiring was halted nor that it was completed. Altik appears to have visited the FCC to meet Carr’s chief of staff and the agency’s general counsel on March 19th, according to the emails. In an April email chain, he communicates from a DOGE address with Watson about DOGE’s deregulatory leaderboard.

There appear to be notable gaps in what Frequency Forward expected to receive from the agency. For example, there are so far no emails produced discussing Carr’s visit to a SpaceX launch, which he posted about on November 19th last year, posing in a photo with President Donald Trump and Musk. The request for documents covered communications since 2021 “relating to travel by Brendan Carr or the Carr Office to any location or facility of any Elon Musk Affiliated Entity.”

Documents do show that FCC staff close to Carr were eager to share perceived wins with the White House. In an email to Altik, Makecha, Wick, and DOGE staffer Ashley Boizelle, a former Amazon and FCC attorney, Carr’s chief of staff flagged a press release announcing that a review of agency contracts would save taxpayers millions. “Appreciate the partnership and support!” Watson wrote. In a separate message to Boizelle, Watson flagged Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative to remove “unnecessary rules” at the FCC. “Awesome!” Boizelle responded.

As the Supreme Court appears poised to greatly weaken the autonomy of what were created as independent agencies, including the FCC and Federal Trade Commission, it underscores how under Trump, the chairs of such agencies have already been largely willing to follow the president’s will. “There’s enough in this production to suggest that a lot of these agencies have already ceased to be independent. There’s just a real desire to demonstrate fealty to DOGE,” says Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes corporate influence in government roles. “I don’t think there was an enormous amount revealed, but what is revealed suggests that the agency is not independent.”

And beyond the inclusion of the ethics manuals, there’s little information so far about what was done to prevent conflicts of interest. Makecha and Wick signed financial interests certification forms acknowledging receipt of ethics guidance and disclosing as of March that they or their families held “financial interests in a corporation, company, firm, mutual fund, trust or other business enterprise,” though it does not specify which or how much. The agency released what’s labeled as a confidential financial disclosure report from Wick that contains several fully redacted pages.

Though Wick — a former Waymo software engineer — had not previously worked for a Musk-affiliated company, Makecha is the former head of strategic planning at Tesla Energy. A government ethics form shared by ProPublica shows he owns between $50,000 and $100,000 of Tesla stock. The connection could raise significant concerns. While SpaceX is more directly regulated by the FCC because it relies on approvals for its satellites, Hauser notes that Musk has famously blurred the lines between his businesses when it comes to staffing. “Musk has gotten away with treating his companies as interchangeable. He famously brought in a bunch of engineers from different Musk companies to deal with Twitter when he took it over,” he says. “There’s ample evidence to consider anyone who works for a Musk-dominated company to be a Musk employee, and that’s first and foremost for whom they work.”

A form from Altik published by ProPublica does not show ownership of Musk company assets. The outlet did not post a disclosure of this same type of form for Wick, and the US Office of Government Ethics told The Verge it did not have that form available under his name.

One email exchange in late April and early May appears to show that Wick was interested in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Expediting and narrowing NEPA environmental reviews has been a priority of the Trump administration, which boasted in June that it had “coordinated a historic effort” to reduce the burden of NEPA and speed up energy infrastructure rollouts.

In the FOIA’d emails, Wick asked the FCC’s general counsel, Adam Candeub, to set up a meeting to discuss, and requests he “include someone on the meeting who is a technical contributor to the underlying NEPA review tracking system” to walk through the system “and answer a few questions about feasibility of implementing certain features.” Candeub sent Wick a briefing sheet for the meeting including a “comprehensive list of the nation’s radio antennas,” and “(when required) NEPA compliance.”

Carr’s efforts to cut back regulations at the agency, seemingly aided by the work of DOGE staffers, is likely to come up at the Senate Commerce hearing on Wednesday. But the more recent controversy of Carr’s threats to broadcasters over airing Jimmy Kimmel Live are likely to take center stage. It underscores how even DOGE’s enormously disruptive impact on the federal government can be dampened with the passage of several news cycles.

Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, which has also engaged in FOIA fights with the Trump administration, says that judges will likely require the administration to cough up more documents about DOGE eventually. But the longer the release is pushed back, the less of a splash the findings may make. “That’s part of it: Throw out a lot of smoke, divert, and take a lot of time, and then like with many things, America loses interest and it’s not a story anymore,” Amey says. “So I think the administration definitely has a plan on all this, and the more they delay, the less of front-page news this becomes, and then they’ll come back and criticize it as being either fake news or stale.”