Ai, Crypto, and DOGE Oh My!

An American Household's playbook for risk management during DOGE's Big Change surge on federal systems.

DOGE surges on Big Change in government

Big Change and Big Tech go hand-in-hand which is why enterprise systems are stress tested regularly. Stress tests validate that systems won’t buckle under an intense surge of traffic and transformation. Unfortunately for Americans, stress-testing is not only an enterprise dev-ops best practice but it’s also a feature of Silicon Valley culture being felt today by federal workers and U.S. citizens as DOGE surges towards government transformation.

🐗 Intense periods of work, colloquially referred to as surges or war rooms, are common practice in Big Tech and describe a time-boxed period where work for big changes is planned against a date that is intentionally aspirational, aka reach goals.

Big Tech also regularly enacts re-orgs. Re-orgs are major reorganizations of personnel, where entire groups may be eliminated or reallocated without prior notice, causing periods of worker confusion and job insecurity.

🦄 Big Tech prides itself on a culture of rapid evolution that defies the laws of physics. During times of Big Change, Titans and Unicorns of Silicon Valley (SV) are catapulted into infamy or burned down. In SV startups, the burn rate is the speed at which funds are spent to surge an idea into reality.

During a surge, or in a war-room, teams work through exhaustion to hit deadlines and milestones. Meals are catered, sleep is deferred, amphetamines are passed around, distractions are muted, and programmers stay wired-in/ tethered to their machines. This is the Silicon Valley environment of Big Change fueling DOGE’s fire.

My first surge project at Apple was a black project (codename springboard) for the 10th anniversary of the Apple Retail Store. I was on a small developer team that pioneered Apple’s proprietary global retail digital signage platform: Smart Sign¹. That project plan included a drop-dead deadline and an eager executive sponsor, Ron Johnson. The resulting 6 month period of manic work, in a stuffy windowless room with a dozen other sweaty engineers and caffeine on tap taught me how to keep up with Silicon Valley’s disruptor culture while indoctrinating me into Big Tech’s risk framework.

🔥 Today, DOGE’s surge in federal systems is stress-testing Americans in the name of Big Change, putting essential services at risk to drive progress towards Ai and crypto transformation.

Why risk management is important

What Americans are collectively experiencing now is government system big change and agency restructuring in the name of “efficiency and fraud elimination” which is corporate speak for cost-cutting and a change of priorities. What DOGE is implementing is a comprehensive reshuffle of system business logic and funding prioritization. Risk is unavoidable with a change of this magnitude which is why our next topic of knowledge transfer is risk management.

Risk management is one of my favorite topics in cyber defense because it is both productive and empowering. When put into practice, risk management becomes a saving grace in the face of cyber disasters. It also provides an outlet to channel anxiety… which is something we can all use these days.

DOGE Federal Systems Changes Recap

The last three weeks have been especially productive for DOGE. Here are highlighted major changes that are already impacting federal systems:

• Mass Layoffs: DOGE has overseen mass layoffs (200k) across multiple federal agencies, impacting tens of thousands of public sector workers.

• Credit Card Shutdowns: DOGE deactivated approximately 146,000 government credit cards across 16 agencies and in doing so pausing essential government functions.

• AI Job Assessment: DOGE introduced an AI system to evaluate federal employees' job justifications. Workers were asked to submit summaries of their weekly accomplishments, which were then analyzed to determine the necessity of their roles.

In addition to mass layoffs, DOGE is also signaling that it intends to implement major changes to the Social Security Administration including: outsourcing customer service operations, requiring in-person identification validation to receive benefits and shuttering offices in remote locations. GSA is now reported as implementing Ai chat technology and we have a newly minted federal crypto reserve² that will purportedly be funded with monies recovered by DOGE’s “fraud” audit. 🙄

How to read

Risk management gives you the tools to know your blindspots, recognize important signals and prioritize your time. During the DOGE surge period of intense transformation in government systems (big change), a risk management strategy will help you rationalize outages caused by DOGE that impact your household and decide when/ if you want to take action to mitigate. Going forward, it’s critical you use your time wisely and continue to make progress towards building a moat to protect your household from DOGE’s breaking changes. This guidance aims to give you a mental model to organize your next steps.

President's Day UPDATE: A Household Guide to Cyber Defense against Nation State Agent: DOGE

Risk Management Strategies

Here are some strategies to give you a mental model for risk management during a cyber disaster. This may seem like a rudimentary defense, but the best tactics in cyber defense are just that: simple.

💋 KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid is one of the mottos that Big Tech execs live by.

Know what you don’t know

Do you know the contact information for all of the important people in your life? Do you know how to drive to an important location without navigation? Do you know exactly how much money you have in your bank accounts? Do you know where your important documents are stored? Do you know how to operate a generator or fix a water leak?

If you don’t know these things that is OK. But know what you don’t know. This is a best practice in enterprise architecture and is also a skill that is fine tuned as you move up the management chain in Big Tech. Knowing what you don’t know is necessary to identify blind spots in your cyber defense strategy.

🫣 A blind spot is just what is sounds like: an identified unknown. When you know what you don’t know, you can start to size risk and plan accordingly.

It’s not necessary to know everything, and realistically it is not possible either. When building enterprise systems there are many opportunities for unknowns and the bigger the install base of those systems, the bigger the unknowns.

Some examples of common Big Tech unknowns

• Technical debt - Legacy code that’s been “wrapped” with newer code to force modernization, or stop-gap solutions that are implemented as temporary bandaids but lived on in perpetuity.

• Tribal knowledge - Attrition is high in Big Tech so the original creators of large legacy systems often move on well before their systems are deprecated, leaving newcomers to guess why implementation choices were made.

• Black boxes - Ai is a black box technology that is indeterministic. There is more we don’t know with Ai than we know, making it a particularly high risk tech to adopt in enterprise infrastructure.

What does DOGE want?

One obvious unknown is what does DOGE want? There are strong indicators that DOGE wants to migrate the federal systems into an American version of WeChat. I have a sense of where DOGE is trying to take us and the more moves they make the more sure I am that an American “X” as WeChat is their end-goal. You can read more about my predictions in my first DOGE post.

A household guide for cyber defense against DOGE attacks

We should assume we do not know what DOGE’s end goal is, and as long as we do not know we will not partake. This is rule #1 of risk management in cyber security: Never Trust Always Verify, AKA “Zero Trust”.

🛡️ Zero Trust is a tenant of Microsoft Security and a complex concept for securing an enterprise environment. For the everyday American, here are some of the Zero Trust principals you can use in your daily life as you navigate DOGE’s cutover of federal systems.

Next Steps

Make a list of what you don’t know. This is a good place to start to figure out what your risk is. Write down your worries and rank them. Cross out the worries that are not actionable. It’s impossible to remove all risks from our lives, but there are obvious unknowns that can be tackled with mitigation. For example, if you do not have a great sense of direction, like myself, download offline maps for your phone or buy paper maps. If you aren’t sure whether you have your health records in one place, call your doctor to see if they have them stored for you and if you can get copies.

📌 Don’t boil the ocean with this task and remember KISS!

Decipher signal from noise

Cyber Attackers use a common tactic to overwhelm systems when they are attacked that looks a lot like a forced stress-test. This serves many purposes, one of which is to overwhelm Defenders and obfuscate the important signals that tell us what the attacker’s motive is. Knowing this is critical to decipher signal from noise.

🥷 Defenders are the cyber security pros, like myself, that monitor and respond to cyber threats. Defenders are also administrators that have admin privileges over enterprise environments to controls access and secure data.

You are the Defender of your Household’s data and systems.

Signals are important data points and clues, oftentimes they are dates of observation (when things happen) or messages that contain cryptic indicators (like dog whistles). Signals can also be role changes in organizations, notable meetings or gatherings of stakeholders. Sometimes the lack of a signal can be important as well, when systems go offline we need to know why.

☢️ Going forward, watch out for launch dates and integration points, major policy changes and executive reshuffling activities coming out of DOGE.

A good example of an important signal is what DOGE is doing to the Social Security Administration by removing phone services for identity verification. This is a critical signal that tells us they are migrating the auth-model for a payment system that 73M Americans depend on. Authentication is a required gateway to gain access, so the deprecation of an auth-over-phone protocol is especially remarkable and tells us major changes are on the way to the SSA federal system.

“Ack” the noise, then mute it.

There is a lot of noise coming from the government. With executive orders flying out of the Oval Office it’s hard to not feel like your head is spinning but try your best to mute these distractions.

✅ Ack the noise. In Big Tech, to “Ack” something is to acknowledge it, make a mental note. Then carry on with your job.

Remember how we talked about DOGE’s surge for big change. They are locked in rooms, with no outside contact and little distractions, pulling long days in order to drive big change. If these DOGE team members are surging on federal systems we need to pay very close attention to the systems they’re augmenting while tuning out the click and rage bait coming from the DOGE propaganda channel (aka the White House press room).

Prioritization framework

There is a saying that’s helpful to use when prioritizing: You can either be fast, cheap or good, but you can only pick 2 of the 3. Remember this when deciding what to tackle to prepare for potential outages caused by DOGE’s big changes in federal systems.

Here are ideas to get you started on how to prepare:

The Importance of Backing Up

Be fast and good for what matters most

I do not think we have much time to get ahead of breaking changes to federal systems in healthcare, transportation and banking. We are already seeing reports of outages in air travel, SNAP benefits and national parks. For this reason I am going to strongly encourage you to prioritize securing funds and backup plans if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck or dependent on social security, medicare and medicaid.

Insulate your household from DOGE attack outages with offline local banking

Now is the time to prioritize:

Do these things over the next 60 days:

• Schedule necessary medical procedures and appointments. For example, In our household we have prioritized covid + flu vaccination, hernia surgery, dental implants, a colonoscopy screening and vasectomy.

• Download your student loan papers from the DOE if you still have loans outstanding. Download medical records to your household computer. Download banking statements for social security and your savings accounts and file them somewhere safe. Apply for an updated passport if yours is expired or, if you don’t have a passport already, get the application turned in and expedited.

• Have cash stored in your house for 1-3 months of expenses. This may be impossible for many, in that case, consider taking out a line of credit on your home, a HELOC, if you own. If a HELOC is not possible reach out to your community, your church, local officials, family and friends. Let them know you are going to be in really bad shape if your benefits are impacted by DOGE changes and ask them whether they’d be willing to barter for goods or housing if it comes to that.

• Come up with a plan for backup power and telecommunications. This may mean buying a generator with neighbors/ family and having long-range walki talkis as an alternative to cell service if we are forced to begin using Starlink for everyday communications.

American Household Cyber Defense HEADS UP: DOGE's Starlink plans for air traffic control governance

Be cheap and fast for everything else

Prioritize taking steps towards building a moat around your household for other essential services. Buy canned goods, large bags of shelf-stable grains, like rice. Stock up on everyday first aid and prescription meds. Prioritize getting appliances and electronics repaired. If you’ve been procrastinating home repairs, now is a good time to get a quote and get them scheduled. The construction workforce is dwindling and once mass deportations pick up we may see long stretches of time where construction sites are abandoned and you cannot get materials necessary for basic builder projects.

Panic is counterproductive

Most of all, do not panic. Manage the risk, work towards a defensive cyber security posture by giving yourself distance and space to think rationally and respond to what comes next.

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I wrote this post today to honor my grandmother Virginia, she taught me that knowledge is the most powerful defense in the face of adversity. She was a public high school history teacher at a Title 1 school in metro Atlanta, a master gardener, an artist, a mentor, and the center of our family. To all the current and retired public school teachers, parapros, councilors, administrators, cooks, and janitors out there, I thank you for your service and promise to fight for our schools.

Stay strong friends,

~ 🌳 Lexi

1. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/2011-05-22-apple-store-celebrates-10th-anniversary-with-2-0-experience-ipa.html

2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/establishment-of-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-and-united-states-digital-asset-stockpile/