Members of the U.S. DOGE Service spoke regularly over Signal, the encrypted chat service that can auto-delete messages. They were informally recruited by people they knew. And other government employees didn’t know who was “DOGE.” When DOGE members were deposed in January as part of a lawsuit over cuts to grants awarded to the National Endowment for the Humanities, they described a vague network of similarly minded technologists and lawyers who had been tasked with a vast mandate to reduce federal spending. They also described a lack of structure that allowed them to operate with little oversight or understanding of...