On another conference call Friday, Bataille and former Office of Management and Budget acting director Jeff Zients, who has been brought in to oversee the tech surge, deflected repeated attempts by reporters to learn the identities, saying that they just wanted these brilliant minds to be able to keep their heads down and focused on the task at hand.

On a Monday afternoon conference call, Alex Wayne of Bloomberg News tried a different approach. Instead of attempting to ask the names of those involved in the tech surge, he asked Batille how many people were involved.

Yet apparently even that was too much to ask, because Bataille responded that she didn’t want those working on the project to be “distracted.”