One is a 23-year-old Nebraskan software programmer who assisted in deciphering a centuries-old scroll. Another, a senior at Harvard, placed second in a "hackathon" competition last year. A third is the CEO of a start-up worth billions of dollars.
These individuals are part of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose efforts to reduce public spending and restructure the federal bureaucracy have caused a stir among government organizations.
DOGE employees have been unexpectedly showing up across the country's bureaucracy for the past few weeks, requesting access to computer systems, databases, and private documents. A terrified federal workforce has described their travels within offices from Washington, DC, to Kansas City, and media outlets have documented their movements in an effort to learn more about their precise actions and goals.
"No information has been provided to Congress or the public as to who has been formally hired under DOGE, under what authority or regulations DOGE is operating, or how DOGE is vetting and monitoring its staff and representatives before giving them seemingly unfettered access to classified materials and Americans’ personal information," read a letter sent this week by Democratic senators to the White House, summarizing some of the most vehement concerns.
The list of young, twentysomething software engineers employed by DOGE have remarkable tech accomplishments listed on their résumé, despite their apparent lack of government experience.
In the meantime, DOGE has been bragging about its purported achievements on Musk's social media account, X: "DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day," the account stated in a post last week. "A solid beginning, but this figure must rise to more than $3 billion per day."
The group has drawn attention to what it has called wasted spending, including scores of leases for "underutilized" buildings and millions in contracts tied to "DEI."
However, others caution that DOGE's strategy could jeopardize government departments that deliver essential public services.
Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering better governance and a more robust democracy, stated that "if you don't understand the system you're trying to change, you don't understand how to prevent bad consequences." "An embodiment of the Silicon Valley world, 'break it and then fix it,'" he said of DOGE's efforts. The fact that government is not a tech start-up should alarm us. In the public sector, breaking something to fix it is a terrible model because people are harmed.
The person who created DOGE's program has compared the current state of affairs to the birth of the nation as it proceeds with its historic reorganization of agencies covering everything from international aid to aviation to commerce.
Musk responded, "Yes," to a post on X that referred to the endeavor as "The Second American Revolution." and badly needed.
DOGE connects to organizations
Security officials originally denied two DOGE employees access to personnel information and sensitive security files when they arrived at the US Agency for International Development headquarters last week.
They eventually gained entrance to the DOGE offices after the personnel threatened to alert law authorities, several people with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The wife of President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, Katie Miller, who was appointed to DOGE in December, seemed to attest that DOGE staff members were able to obtain secret material at USAID.
In a post on X, she stated, "No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances."
Without definitive answers regarding the legality of the actions or the security precautions taken to reduce risk, the showdown sparked worries about how much more sensitive data and databases DOGE and its employees would eventually access as they swept through federal agencies across the government.
The DOGE operation has persisted in asking and successfully accessing internal systems from agency to agency in addition to USAID.
Three people with knowledge of the matter claim that at least one DOGE representative was granted access to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's IT systems this week in order to identify personnel and activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
According to a VA spokesperson, a DOGE employee has also been examining contracts and operations at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which houses the biggest integrated health care system in the country. The individual "will not have access" to veterans' data.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said that two senior agency officials are spearheading the "collaboration" with DOGE, which "includes ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology."
Musk wrote on X that "this is where the big money fraud is happening" in reaction to the Wall Street Journal's original coverage of the CMS development.
A few agencies are getting ready to collaborate with DOGE. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy excitedly announced the new DOGE alliance following the nation's deadliest airplane tragedy in more than 20 years.
"Exciting News - spoke with the DOGE group. On X Wednesday, Duffy wrote, "They will plug in to help upgrade our aviation system." The Department of Transportation has not disclosed specifics of its intentions, and it is unclear how DOGE will enhance the aviation system.
However, not all of DOGE's attempts to gain access to agency systems have been successful; unions and other departments have filed lawsuits to stop DOGE from collecting data.
Anticipating that it would be headed to the Department of Labor, the largest labor union in the country, the AFL-CIO, filed an emergency complaint against DOGE this week in an effort to prevent Musk's team "from unlawfully accessing the DOL's systems and information."
Assuring all workers who communicate with the Labor Department that their information won't be given to an unelected CEO whose companies have been the focus of multiple DOL investigations over the years is a top priority for the labor movement, according to a press release issued by the AFL-CIO.
The unusual, brief relationship between longtime software CEO Tom Krause and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old recent hire at Musk's company SpaceX, was at the center of most of the controversy surrounding DOGE's examination and access to a large portion of the federal government's financial payment data.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Elez has now quit his position at DOGE after the publication connected him to a social media account that had pro-racism and pro-eugenics postings.
Attorneys for the Justice Department said during a court hearing on Wednesday that the two men, who were classified by the executive branch as "special government employees," gained access to the computer system used by the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Fiscal Service to cut more than $5 trillion in checks for the federal government annually. The hearing was held because of privacy concerns regarding the men's access.
On Wednesday, a judge in the DC District Court received few conclusive responses from government lawyers regarding the actions taken in relation to the financial documents that the two DOGE.
In court, DOJ lawyer Brad Humphreys stated, "I don't know if I can say nothing has been done" with system records, adding that the Justice Department does not currently feel that Americans' privacy has been violated.
The Treasury Department confirmed in a letter to Congress that Krause has joined the department as a "special government employee," the same title Musk holds, meaning he can only work for the government for 130 days or less in the upcoming year.
In addition to requiring the same ethical standards of privacy, confidentiality, conflict of interest evaluation, and professionalism as other government employees, this position entails a hiring procedure that reviews a candidate's qualifications and experience. According to the letter, career legal and ethics authorities carry out these evaluations. "Mr. Krause has a Top Secret security clearance and is subject to the same ethical and security requirements."
DOJ attorneys informed the judge that Krause and Elez's access did not grant them the authority to alter the Treasury payments system, and the Justice Department does not think the staff members had discussed or shared it with anybody outside the Treasury Department.
Krause has a history of directing software firms and is currently the CEO of Cloud Software Group in addition to his position at DOGE, according to his LinkedIn profile.
According to public records, Elez graduated from Rutgers University in 2021 and started working at Elon Musk's SpaceX company shortly after, suggesting that his job experience is less lengthy. While in college, he was the co-founder and chief technology officer of a firm named Unimetrics, according to a cached Google result for an Instagram post.
Before taking their positions at DOGE, neither Krause nor Elez seem to have any prior federal government employment experience.
"Disposable figures on a financial statement"
The lack of transparency and chaotic nature of the changes have shocked and alarmed federal employees who are witnessing the swift overhauls of their agency. The DOGE team and its affiliated entities are being scrutinized more closely for their qualifications as information from employees going through the adjustments begins to surface.
One speaker at a recent town hall in northern Virginia remarked, "My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19, 20, 21-year-old college graduates asking to justify their existence," without naming himself or his agency out of concern for reprisals.
"We received word that supervisors will now have to complete a justification form and that all of our agency's employees will be subject to a 30% rank and yank," he continued.
Since the inauguration, some of Musk's senior lieutenants have been employed by DOGE, either directly at the Office of Personnel Management or as advisors. These include OPM senior adviser Brian Bjelde, formerly vice president of people operations at SpaceX, and Amanda Scales, currently OPM's chief of staff and former talent at Musk's AI company until January. They also include Steve Davis, CEO of the Boring Company, who assisted Musk during the 2022 purge of Twitter employees.
Stephen Ehikian, a digital entrepreneur, was appointed interim director of the General Services Administration (GSA), which is in charge of federal procurement and real estate, last month. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, was named the agency's Technology Transformation Services group director.
Speaking to CNN under the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, two GSA employees remembered a recent meeting with young DOGE staff and claimed that DOGE seems solely focused on cost-cutting, regardless of the repercussions.
According to one of those GSA workers, DOGE employees requested access to private government information but would not reveal their identity. The public servant recalls being told, "We don't care about the policy work you do. Show us technical work so we keep you."
The employee claimed that their fixation on managing our agency "like a business" is nothing more than a careless corporate takeover that ignores the vital role we play in providing public services.
He claimed that federal servants are being treated by the Trump administration "like disposable numbers on a balance sheet."
The senior leadership of DOGE has little to no experience in government and is primarily from the business sector. As initially reported by WIRED, its team also seems to consist of a group of software developers in their early 20s, some of whom have ties to Musk's businesses. It's still unclear what exactly many of the younger employees are responsible for.
Agency sources told CNN that other young employees had titles in internal systems, such as Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old Nebraska software engineer who won a $700,000 grand prize at the Vesuvius Challenge for his team's remarkable use of artificial intelligence to decode Greek passages from an unopened ancient scroll. Farritor was included in the 2024 Thiel Fellowship class last year, which was established by Peter Thiel, a millionaire internet founder and associate of Elon Musk.
According to two people with knowledge of the matter who spoke to CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright allowed Farritor access to the department's IT system on Wednesday despite protests from the general counsel and chief information offices.
Another is Akash Bobba, a recent University of California, Berkeley graduate who previously interned at Palantir and Meta. A old classmate recently praised Bobba on X, sharing a story of a group project in which Bobba saved the day by restoring a codebase that had been inadvertently erased. The classmate wrote, "I trust him with everything I own."
Following his high school graduation last year, Edward Coristine seems to have been enrolled in Northeastern University. According to a resumé that WIRED was able to obtain, Coristine interned at Neuralink, Musk's brain chip business, last summer.
According to a Harvard webpage, Ethan Shaotran is a student who has filed four patents and worked on AI projects. Shaotran discussed his AI scheduling assistant firm, which was financed by a $100,000 OpenAI grant, in an essay that was published by Business Insider last September.
"I work on the startup for around 85 hours a week, mostly writing code," he added. OPM chief of staff Scales formerly worked for the Musk business where Shaotran was a member of a team that placed second in an xAI "hackathon" competition last year.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Gavin Kliger, 25, is a senior advisor at OPM and a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he studied computer science and electrical engineering till 2020.
Kliger is described as a software engineer who writes on technology and politics on his Substack page, which also features a profile photo that corresponds to the person's LinkedIn profile.
Kliger's earlier blog entries, "The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies" and "Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears," focused on two of Trump's cabinet choices.
"Why DOGE" was the title of Kliger's most recent premium subscription post, which read, "Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America." The subscription-only article, which was accessible for $1,000 a month but has since been removed, seems to have been published after his identity was made public.
Although the DOGE job application page is short, it is unclear how rigorous the recruiting process is. Along with requesting a CV, contact details, and full name, the website requests that candidates "provide 2-3 bullet points showcasing exceptional ability."