For the past month, and at the direction of President Donald Trump, tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team have been hard at work discovering and exposing egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending in departments and agencies across the government.

On Tuesday, however, it was reported that 21 members of DOGE resigned in protest against the program cuts and employee terminations that have resulted from the team's work, according to Fox News.

What was conveniently left out of the media headlines and buried deep within the reports, however, was that those employees resigning from DOGE were career bureaucrats and holdovers from the pre-existing federal agency that was transformed into DOGE and given a new assignment that they never supported by Trump and Musk.

DOGE reorganized from a pre-existing agency

On President Trump's first day in office, he issued an executive order that reorganized DOGE out of the preexisting U.S. Digital Service, an executive branch agency first created by former President Barack Obama to provide technical support for the failing Obamacare website and, more broadly, the computer systems of other executive branch agencies and departments.

Trump then retasked DOGE with "modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity," and further instructed it to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending.

Further, the president granted DOGE 18 months of authorization to complete the assigned tasks and ordered DOGE to send small teams to each department and agency to work on those tasks.

Resigning staffers were career bureaucrats from pre-existing USDS

Fast-forward a month to the purported bombshell report from the Associated Press about 21 DOGE staffers who resigned this week in protest against Musk and President Trump and the supposed exploitation of their technical expertise to "dismantle critical public services" against their will.

The clear implication from the AP report and others that followed was that the resigning staffers were devotees of Musk who'd been brought in help DOGE but had become disillusioned with the reality of the job after only a few weeks.

It wasn't until nearly a third of the way into the AP's article that it was acknowledged that those staffers -- most of whom were engineers, data scientists, designers, and product managers -- were actually career bureaucrats who'd been working for the USDS for years before Trump was elected and Musk began his work with the newly rechristened DOGE.

Indeed, Musk noted in response to the report that the AP was pushing "fake news" about the mass resignations of DOGE staffers who were "Dem political holdovers" from the prior administration and most likely "would have been fired had they not resigned."

Resigning staffers complain but Trump remains undeterred

The resignation letter signed by the 21 DOGE staffers was shared with the AP and reportedly said, "We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions."

The letter sharply criticized Musk and the people he'd brought in to work for DOGE and decried an initial round of layoffs that cut loose 40 USDS workers, leaving around 65 employees from the prior administration, of which a third just resigned.

"These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services," the letter stated of the firings and resignations. "Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s data less safe."

The White House remains unswayed from its mission, though, as press secretary Karoline Leavitt made clear in a statement to the AP, in which she said, "Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years," and added, "President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers."