The Creeps & Dweebs of DOGE
Sources:
LISTS OF NAMES:
Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew, ProPublica, Feb 6, 2025, (updated regularly), https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/
Vittoria Elliott, The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover, Wired, Feb. 2, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/
Jack Newsham, Katie Balevic, Lakshmi Varanasi, Kenneth Niemeyer, We got a DOGE staff list. From a McKinsey alum to a former Clarence Thomas clerk, here are the workers powering Elon Musk's cost-cutting squad., Business Insider, Feb. 11, 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-staff-list-white-house-2025-2
OTHER SOURCES:
Chris Megerian, WATCH: Trump makes appearance with Musk, signs executive order downsizing federal workforce, PBS News, Feb. 11, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-makes-appearance-with-musk-signs-executive-order-downsizing-federal-workforce
Aaron Holmes, Sam Tabahriti, The CEO of Elon Musk's Boring Company who reportedly slept at Twitter HQ with his wife and baby once owned a bar called 'Thomas Foolery', Business Insider, Dec. 24, 2024, https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-davis-boring-company-elon-musk-career-bio-2019-11
Nick Robins-Early, Who is helping Elon Musk gut the US government?, The Guardian, Feb. 8, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/08/elon-musk-doge-team-staff
Meg Kinnard, Joshua Goodman, Trump and Musk demand termination of federal office leases through General Services Administration, AP News, Feb. 4, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-gsa-terminate-office-leases-f8faac5e2038722f705587c8dd21ab26
Nic White, Brittany Chain, Elon Musk's chief nerd celebrates DOGE appointment with elaborate $1,000 troll scam, Daily Mail, Feb. 5, 2025, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14363699/Elon-Musk-doge-nerd-Gavin-Kliger-substack-troll-usaid.html
Julia Steinberg, The 22-Year-Old Who Unlocked the Secrets of Ancient Rome, The Free Press, Feb. 16, 2024, https://www.thefp.com/p/luke-farritor-vesuvius-challenge-scrolls-rome
Shubhangi Goel, I'm a Harvard senior who balances college and my OpenAI-backed startup through these 3 productivity tips, Business Insider, Sept. 1, 2024, https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-senior-balances-college-ai-startup-productivity-enterprise-openai-coding-2024-8?utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=insider-sf
Josh Fiallo, Unmasked: Musk’s Secret DOGE Goon Squad—Who Are All Under 26, Daily Beast, Feb. 3, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-musketeers-secret-team-elon-221351736.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAB6bi5VZJ1zXxtWWdvrXEfNwkWNuLdDsao1GA1_fz3d2ncIoZaoVoSQskFZ10Tp7iBHJbfshR7dgTowpMNNhllSiUfa1bXCrDPgFbj6STmkjKW2OyV4yJpniNYD1Od2c2oXUGnOcouexjUlzJKifzublde4gpsBgxYgcruIEMV0N
Eli Lake, The Boys of DOGE, The Free Press, Feb. 4, 2025, https://www.thefp.com/p/the-boys-of-doge
CFPB Union NTEU 335 spies dodgy DOGE bros, CFPB Union Press Release, Feb. 7, 2025, https://nteu335.org/2025/02/07/cfpb-union-nteu-335-spies-dodgy-doge-bros/
National Treasury Employees Union lawsuit against Vought https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277286/gov.uscourts.dcd.277286.1.0.pdf
Shannon Bond, Stephen Fowler, Bobby Allyn, Who is part of Elon Musk's DOGE, and what are they doing?, NPR, Feb. 7, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5288988/doge-elon-musk-staff-trump
Charlie Spiering, Terrified staff left hysterical as 'well drilled' DOGE nerds storm hyper 'woke' Department of Education, Daily Mail, Feb. 11, 2025, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14386263/Terrified-staff-left-hysterical-drilled-DOGE-nerds-storm-hyper-woke-Department-Education.html
Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’, Wired, Feb. 7, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-bfs-doge-insider-threat/?utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social
Andy Greenberg, David Gilbert, Lily Hay Newman, DOGE Teen Owns ‘Tesla.Sexy LLC’ and Worked at Startup That Has Hired Convicted Hackers, Feb. 6, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/edward-coristine-tesla-sexy-path-networks-doge/
Kathryn Watson, Federal employees union files lawsuits over CFPB shutdown and DOGE access, CBS News, Feb. 10, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cfpb-shutdown-doge-nteu-lawsuits/
Chris Walker, Elon Musk Reinstates DOGE Member Who Resigned Over Racist Posts, Truthout, Feb. 10, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/elon-musk-reinstates-doge-member-who-resigned-over-racist-posts/
Transcript:
19 year olds with ties to cyber attacks, college dropouts with ties to Peter Thiel, none of them with a lick of government experience, and all of them hellbent on doing their idol Elon Musk’s dirty work. The cadre of creeps and dweebs Musk has surrounded himself with in the Department of Government “Efficiency” or DOGE is truly a parade of horribles gaining access to THE most sensitive data and information inside the federal government, with zero oversight and no guardrails in place. Involved in the dismantling of USAID, the CFPB, the Treasury Department, and now the Department of the Education, DOGE and Elon Musk’s lackeys are quickly scuttling through every aspect of the functioning of our government and attempting to “reduce inefficiency” and “save money” by creating absolute chaos across the entire federal bureaucracy. And most of these kids don’t even have fully developed frontal lobes yet. Today we’re diving into the list of these creeps and dweebs because Congress isn’t doing shit and the media is doing a good job of at least naming and shaming these absolute asshats, shining a light on the incompetence that is quickly dismantling the United States government. Let’s get into it.
AD
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The names of DOGE staff that have been dropped, and I’m saying dropped, not leaked, because these people are supposedly working on behalf of the federal government, despite not being overseen by any part of the federal government besides, loosely, the President, these names should be public information. Musk has claimed that it’s a “crime” to release the names of people who work for him, and while it is true that as a “special government employee” Musk is able to get around ethics and financial disclosures that normally apply to federal workers, but there’s still that pesky “government employee” in his title, which, according to his own statements, should subject him and DOGE to a certain amount of oversight by WE THE PEOPLE. So I say release the names!!! Look me in the eye while you dismantle my rights and protections, you fucking cowards. I’m not interested in doxxing these people. I don’t care where they live, I just care that everyone who sees them on the streets knows what they’re doing, and that every future employer knows what they’ve done. So let’s go through the list of the ones who we have information about, because according to reporting from The Guardian, many of these employees have taken steps to limit their online footprints. Sources are linked in the description if you’d like to save the list to have a look. And for the love of god if you went to high school or college or worked with any of these people, do drop the tea in the comments section.
Obviously we have top dog dweeb Elon Musk himself, I’ve talked about him ad nauseum on this channel and will continue to do so, but I just wanted to highlight this video that dropped of him at the White House on Tuesday with the child he’s been using as a human shield to protect himself from assassination, where Trump was supposed to be signing an executive order and Elon just starts awkwardly pontificating while Trump just sits there staring at the small child, something I’m certain he’s not used to having much contact with. I hope and pray that Elon will be his own undoing as he continues to steal the spotlight from Trump, something Trump famously does not like. He talked about how the representatives elected by the people are the ones that should decide what happens and not a large unelected bureaucracy in the administrative state, which is RICH coming from an unelected foreigner leading a large unelected group of people working to drastically change the government while people literally protest in the streets about how we did not elect him. So that’s the man in charge of this all, you hate to see it. And so you know the fruit of the poisonous tree is going to be equally as fucked. Let’s get into them.
Steve Davis, 45, worked alongside Elon to plan out DOGE operations and helped recruit staffers. Also CEO of the Boring Company, an Elon-owned company tasked with drilling tunnels under major US cities for Tesla cars to drive in. He has a PhD in economics from George Mason University, which is a university that has received extensive funding from the Koch brothers to help spread insane deeply libertarian economic fringe theories. In fact, Davis is such a fan of Ayn Rand that he regularly quotes libertarian bible Atlas Shrugged and even appeared as an extra in a 2012 Atlas Shrugged movie. After Elon bought Twitter, he tapped Davis to help with gutting the company, and Davis and his wife set up a literal bedroom in Twitter headquarters where they slept with their NEWBORN BABY so Davis could work long hours. According to the Guardian he is known for cost-cutting and clashing with safety regulations. In 2023, OSHA found that 15-20 Boring employees had been burned as a result of their work on a tunnel underneath Las Vegas. The company technically had a safety manager, who told Fortune that Davis regularly undercut and isolated him in ways that got in the way of his ability to do his job. The safety manager at one point received an email from an employee saying that workers “consistently flirted with death” while in the tunnels. So that’s Elon’s right hand man in the dismantling of our government. He was reportedly on the ground at the USAID office raid and was the one who threatened to call in US marshals if they didn’t grant him access to highly sensitive information. He was reportedly joined in that raid by one Peter Marocco, someone who served at several different agencies under the first Trump administration and has been tapped by Marco Rubio to “run” USAID meaning do the work of DOGE to shut it down. Oh Peter Marocco was also allegedly photographed participating in the January 6th insurrection inside the capitol building.
And if you’re like who is the person Steve Davis is married to that agreed to SLEEP at Twitter headquarters with their fresh baby, well that would be Nicole Hollander, 42. She, conveniently, also worked at Twitter, where she handled the company’s real estate. It is widely reported that, under Elon, Twitter downsized a lot of its real estate holdings to save money. She’s now working at the General Services Administration, the governmental body that, among many other things, handles government real estate. According to reporting from AP, she is leading the effort to end leases on around 7500 federal offices around the country, with a goal of terminating 300 leases per day.
Stephanie Holmes, 43, is running human resources in DOGE, if you can believe it. She was a lawyer for notoriously conservative law firm Jones Day, a firm that frequently represents Trump according to ProPublica. She was a chief people officer at Oklo, which is a nuclear energy company chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and she had an HR consulting firm in which she apparently advised companies they should pursue “non-woke” DEI initiatives, whatever that means.
Katie Miller, 33, NO relation, is married to Stephen Miller, also no relation, ew, the White House Deputy Chef of Staff and known far right activist who is deeply anti-immigrant and has alleged ties to white nationalism. And when I first saw pictures of Katie Miller I was like hmm. AWFULLY TAN. AWFULLY TAN for the wife of a white nationalist. But she was born in Florida to Glenn Waldman and Sherly Bekoff and I guess might just enjoy spray tans as much as our president, though the Times of Israel, when reporting on their nuptials in 2020, said both Stephen and Katie are descendants of immigrants but, like, aren’t we all, that’s the point. They were married at the Trump Hotel in DC, woof. ANYWAY I digress, Katie got a master of public policy from George Washington University and her BA is from the University of Florida. She was active in student government there and, in 2012, she was caught destroying hundreds of copies of the school’s newspaper after it endorsed an opposing student government candidate. Seems she got into book burning and vendettas at a young age. She was deputy press secretary for the department of homeland security under the first Trump administration, during which she repeatedly denied claims that children were being separated from their parents at the border. She was then press secretary to VP Mike Pence. She got COVID in May 2020 and exposed Pence to it, who then exposed Trump, but alas the assassination attempt did not work. Continuing her role as chief denial officer, she is now the DOGE spokesperson and has assured us all that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances” when DOGE raided the USAID offices and demanded access to confidential information…without proper security clearances. She also asserted last week that it would be Elon Musk himself who decides when his actions constituted a conflict of interest or not. So, don’t worry, guys, Elon’s handling it!
There’s also a number of lawyers working for DOGE. Those include:
Jacob Altik, 32, graduate of University of Michigan Law school, one of the best in the country. He clerked for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals for a Trump-appointed judge Rao, a judge known for critiquing the administrative state. The DC Circuit is a very prestigious group of judges to clerk for, many of those judges are tapped for Supreme Court nominations. He has also been selected to clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch starting this summer. It’s unclear what work he’s doing for DOGE, but he has an official DOGE email address.
Then there’s James Burnham, 41, listed as DOGE General Counsel. He worked in Trump’s first term justice department and worked on the judicial selection process including the selection of Judge Gorsuch. He then clerked for Gorsuch in 2020… interesting. A gentle quid pro quo, ALLEGEDLY.
And there’s Keenan D. Kmiec, 45, who clerked for Sam Alito when he was a federal circuit court judge, then clerked for chief justice John Roberts in 2006. Then he got really into crypto and block chain and seems to be pretty libertarian, though he gave $500 to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 and his Dad Douglas is a Reagan administration lawyer who ALSO endorsed Obama and was then named his ambassador to Malta. The fact that he has some background in crypto and blockchain stuff I’m sure deeply appeals to Elon.
And then there’s Austin Raynor, 36, who went to University of Virginia law school, clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas in 2016, and served as assistant to the solicitor general under Trump’s first term. He’s argued before the Supreme Court at least 8 times and, until joining DOGE, most recently worked as a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal organization. He is thought to be instrumental to the order attempting to rewrite the constitution and end birthright citizenship.
And then there’s the group of YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPERS Elon has tapped, and this group of dweebs and creeps has been getting a lot of media attention.
Marko Elez, 25, is technically an employee at the Treasury Department, apparently with direct “read AND write access” to Treasury Department Payment Systems, including two of the most sensitive systems in the US government, according to reporting from Wired. He graduated from Rutgers in 2021, where he studied computer science. Afterwards he was an engineer at SpaceX in Los Angeles for 3 years, and then spent a year as an engineer at Twitter under Elon. However, he resigned from his position in DOGE on February 6th after the Wall Street Journal linked him to a social media account that repeatedly posted racist comments, including one tweet saying he supported a “eugenic immigration policy.” and supported the repeal of the 1964 civil rights act. He bragged that he was a racist “before it was cool” and called on the tech sector to “normalize Indian hate.” He also posted “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and also “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” Most of these were published on twitter within the last year.
Musk then reinstated Marko Elez to his position in DOGE, saying “to err is human, to forgive divine.” Being racist is just human error, you guys!!! There shouldn’t be CONSEQUENCES for that!!! JD Vance agrees, tweeting that “stupid social media activity” shouldn’t ruin a kid’s life, so bring him back. Elon then went on a crusade against the Wall Street Journal reporter who dropped the story about Marko’s racist tweets, saying her reporting was illegal doxxing and saying she should be fired and that she’s a “disgusting and cruel person”. Flagging this because whenever someone in power, even if that power was not earned via election and is being used to take over the government, makes personal attacks against journalists or tries to undercut published articles in major news papers, that should be noted with suspicion. Journalists play a MAJOR role as watchdogs of the government. Katherine Long, the reporter, was doing her job. There are lots of criticisms to be rightfully lobbed at mainstream media, but sowing widespread distrust and personal attacks on journalists, especially by people with lots of governmental power and none of the ethics that journalists tend to have, is very very dangerous territory. Trump does it. Elon Musk does it. It needs to be called out for what it is.
Elez and other DOGE members have access to Treasury Department systems, which prompted the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies to designate DOGE staff as an “insider threat” who should be monitored and have their access revoked pending a review of all actions they have taken on the systems. They alleged there were reports that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of sensitive systems. The intelligence team stated in an email “Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
Luke Farritor is 23 years old and is the Executive Engineer in the office of the secretary for the department of health and human services. He studied computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and interned at SpaceX. And in March last year he got a Thiel fellowship, as in Peter Thiel, far right billionaire tech entrepreneur lunatic. The Thiel fellowship gives a $100,000 start up grant to students who drop out of college. That’s right this boy does not have a computer science DEGREE, he just took a few undergrad classes and then Elon was like what is this?? A white boy who likes computers?? HIRED. To illustrate just how much of a dweeb this guy is, he studied Latin, is a huge history buff, and won $250,000 for using AI to decode an ancient scroll from the ruins of Pompeii. Okay admittedly that’s really cool, but I mean LOOK at this kid. He then dropped out of college to work for Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman, who was running the competition Luke won, doing what Luke described as “mostly investing stuff” to reporters for The Free Press. Not sure what that means for computer science drop out, probably AI-based investing stuff I would guess. ANYWAY now he’s the executive engineer at the department of health and human services, obviously.
Cole Killian, whose real name is “Gautier” which sounds like a rich prep school boy name if I ever heard one, is 24 years old and works, for now, as a “federal detailee” at the Environmental Protection Agency. According to ProPublica, “federal detail” allows government employees to transfer between agencies for temporary roles, so he’s officially a member of the DOGE team who is on assignment at the EPA, it appears. He studied math and computers at McGill University. ProPublica says he “conducted blockchain-related research” at McGill and I mean, I don’t know. I think a lot of these media outlets are giving more credence to these boys’ undergraduate background. “Conducting research” as a sophomore in college or whatever doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing or are gaining much experience, you know? That these kids “did research” in undergrad or “studied computer science” doesn’t say much at all about their experience or skill level, especially since it appears some of them didn’t even graduate. So saying Cole Killian “conducted blockchain-related research” while in undergrad means fucking nothing. He’s read a couple articles. Which I guess makes him qualified to head DOGE efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Gavin Kliger is 25 and a “senior advisor” at the office of personnel management, though his work included the closure of USAID. His email was the one that all replies were sent to when USAID employees responded to the message informing them that the Washington offices were closing down. Gavin Kliger is, again, 25 with zero government experience. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020 and spent 5 years as a software engineer at a cloud-based AI company called Databrick. Recently on his Substack he posted an essay called “Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.” It was behind, I shit you not, a $1000 paywall, and then the post itself was blank. The only other two posts on his Substack was one titled “The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies” and “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.” The “seven figure salary” post was apparently a troll, especially given that, according to reporting from Daily Mail, salaries for his position at Databrick range from about 100,000 to 300,000 dollars. Which, if you can’t count, is six figures. And just to further illustrate why this man is a dweeb, according to the DailyMail which obtained access to his now-deleted Github, he’s a blackbelt in Taekwondo, loves playing piano and clarinet, and one of his favorite pastimes is playing online blitz chess. Plus, I mean, just look at him. For those listening to the podcast version, please trust he’s just a dweeb in a suit. Kliger was also just named in a lawsuit, filed on February 9th, against acting head of the CFPB, Russell Vought, brought by the National Treasury Employees Union on behalf of CFPB employees, seeking to halt disclosure of their sensitive personal information to DOGE. The lawsuit lists Kliger, Chris Young, and Nikhil Rajpal as three DOGE employees that were forcibly added to CFPB email directories as “senior advisors” within the CFPB. Vought has instructed the CFPB to give DOGE access to all non-classified systems, according to the lawsuit. So it seems Kliger, and these other two names who haven’t been previously reported on, are actively moving from agency to agency working on shutting things down. According to a press release from the union, Chris Young is a lobbyist for Big Pharma, and Nikhil Rajpal went to UC Berkeley where he led a libertarian students group and also previously worked at Tesla and Twitter.
Akash Bobba, 21, is also a very recent graduate of UC Berkeley. ProPublica reported he graduated from high school in 2021 and when I read that I thought oh no that must be a typo right and then I did the math and yeah 2021 was 4 years ago. He interned at Meta and also at Palantir, the data analytics firm that is a major defense contractor and was founded by billionaire right wing lunatic Peter Thiel. Remember how I said he owns JD Vance and is going to have his fingers rather secretly in all sorts of government pies? This is one way of doing so–taking young impressionable ambitious boys, turning them into acolytes and then placing them strategically in the government. Bobba is a “senior advisor” and listed as an “expert” in the Office of Personnel Management, where reports are that he has access to large internal databases. According to the Daily Mail Bobba also gained access to the Department of Education yesterday, Tuesday, as upwards of 16 different DOGE staffers infiltrated the Department’s headquarters, the latest victim of the DOGE steamroller. Bobba is, again, 21 years old with zero government experience.
Ethan Shaotran was also named as a DOGE staffer with new access to the Department of education. Ethan is a 22 year old senior at Harvard, was a member of the team that was a finalist in a hackathon organized by Elon’s company xAI. He also founded an AI-startup in 2023 with a $100,000 grant from OpenAI, during the height of “omg AI is going to revolutionize everything and make people into billionaires” discourse. The startup is “EnergizeAI” in which he created a scheduling assistant called Spark. He was profiled in an article in Business Insider in September of last year titled “I’m a Harvard senior who balances college and my OpenAI-backed startup through these 3 productivity tips.” His 3 tips? Time blocking, using an AI note taker, and having hobbies. Once again, photo evidence he’s a certified nerd. Again, I think this illustrates how misleading it can be when the media describes someone as a “startup founder.” This kid apparently grew up creating iOS apps in his free time in middle school, got into Harvard so now he has “knows computer” and “Harvard” under his belt which is all it takes to then spin that into “tech entrepreneur” and get the attention of openAI to give you 100 grand to sit in your dorm room writing code. I think when the average person hears “startup founder” or “tech startup” they picture like glass-walled offices and loads of engineers and interns sitting around in bean bag chairs building the future of tech. It’s usually a lot smaller scale and a lot less impressive, and usually ends in failure. It’s common knowledge that 90% of startups fail. Let’s not give these boys more accolades than they deserve, mmkay? Moving on.
Last but certainly not least is Edward Coristine, a 19 YEAR OLD who just graduated from high school and was recently a student at Northeastern University in Boston which, for full disclosure, is where I got my law degree but when I tell you the law school is the black sheep of that university, we were a bunch of queer lefties in a sea of weird STEM bro and business geek undergrad students. This fuckin nerd, LOOK at this kid holy shit, is reportedly heir to a popcorn fortune. His dad is reportedly Charles Coristine, a “businesssman” who bought failing snack company LesserEvil and turned it into a 100 million dollar per year business. Their popcorn, admittedly, fuckin slaps. He interned at Neuralink one summer and according to the Northeastern student newspaper, Elon is one of Edward Coristine’s idols.
Edward sometimes goes by the username “Big Balls” online, ew, and also founded a company called “Tesla.Sexy LLC.” That company, founded when Coristine was 16 years old, controls dozens of web domains, according to reporting from Wired, including at least two registered in Russia, one of which offers a service that uses an AI chat bot for Discord servers targeting Russia. A connection that typically would be flagged in any security clearance background check, except for the part where none of these DOGE employees got background checks because they don’t have security clearance because they’re not official government employees. Wired also reported that a Telegram chat handle associated with Coristine solicited a cyberattack for hire service in 2022. He also briefly worked for Path Network in 2022 as a systems engineer, again when he was 16. Path Network is a company known to hire convicted cyber criminals. Like this was a nerdy kid sitting in his bedroom in high school messing around on the internet, who I’m sure is very smart, I don’t know how to do any of that shit, but who nonetheless uses usernames like Big Balls and still has mush for brains because your brain is not fully developed as a teen! And now he has access to highly sensitive governmental information.
He has reportedly dropped out of school to work for DOGE and has been placed in the Office of Personnel Management where he has the title of “expert.” If your experts are 19 year old college dropouts I think we have a PROBLEM, okay. He is reportedly working to get access to the Small Business Administration’s internal records, and has been on calls with employees who are asked to explain code they had written and justify their jobs. He also was added to a General Services Administration call with staff members using a nongovernmental address, like big balls at gmail dot com has joined the call, and no one explained why he was there or who he was.
And some are defending especially the hiring of very young men to spearhead the work of DOGE, saying that fresh young ideas are needed to counteract the forces of old, crusty bureaucrats, and that young people have often come in throughout our history to shake things up in government. The point they’re missing, likely willfully, is that even the young people with fresh ideas who have come in in the past at least have a working knowledge of government and the experience to back up their positions. These were not 19 year old college dropouts being given the title of “expert” in government agencies they I guarantee you had never heard of until they were given the position. The amount of damage that can be done by a bunch of boys emboldened by the trust given to them by the richest man in the world cannot be underestimated. The amount of “oversight” Musk is providing is likely miniscule, let alone the “oversight” Trump is providing while taking long trips to golf and get his spray tans. These boys are operating with zero transparency to the American people, under the direction of deranged megalomaniacs who have absolutely zero grasp on reality. This has never happened before, this is not similar to things that have happened in the past, and this is. Not. normal. The journalists and politicians claiming that this is okay are willing this country to be driven off a cliff by a handful of boys whose brains literally aren’t even fully developed yet and who lack even a modicum of proper experience or knowledge to manage the things they’re attempting to manage. It’s reckless and the end result will be disastrous for the American people, something they’re all betting they won’t have to care about as they can continue to ride the shirttails of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and all the other tech billionaires they’re rubbing elbows with who they hope will save a pod for them in the ship they launch into outer space once this planet is no longer habitable.
An additional issue with this cadre of horrors is that many of them are affiliated with DOGE or officially on staff with DOGE, but many many are not, and it is really unclear what the DOGE hierarchy or structure is, because it’s so opaque and not bound by any sort of disclosure rules. Because it’s all being run by Musk as a special government employee with limited oversight. And because it’s not an official agency and these people aren’t official federal employees, Congress also has very little ability to directly intervene or monitor what’s happening, because this is being carried out by people who aren’t technically public officials. And yet they are gaining unprecedented access to private information of millions of Americans, plus control over payment systems and other highly confidential mechanisms of the government, mechanisms that typically have extensive oversight and are tightly controlled. It’s an unprecedented power grab that many are calling a coup. It doesn’t look like a traditional coup because there are no marching armies or attacks on capitols, at least not this time. Instead it’s a digital coup, with a small army of nerds who know just enough to be dangerous but not enough to fully understand the weight of their actions, coming in and not only dismantling agencies but also creating genuine chaos across the government and compromising highly sensitive information in a way that only makes this country and the people in it more vulnerable. Because the role of government is to protect and provide for its people. We can argue to what extent it’s supposed to do that, but the end game of this DOGE work appears to be the complete dismantling of the very functioning of government, as the Project 2025 playbook foretold, which is precisely what far right extremists who think the government should protect property rights and nothing more, are gunning for. All in the name of “saving us money” even though the tax cuts Trump has floated have been shown time and again to only benefit people making over $300,000 per year and will actually cost the rest of us MORE money while providing fewer benefits.
DOGE appears to be the main mechanism through which Trump and those pulling the strings behind the scenes are going to implement the Project 2025 agenda to fully dismantle the administrative agencies that ensure the full functioning of government. And we are the ones who will pay the price for this. So remember these names and faces, because they are the ones who will be responsible for the fallout from this chaos.
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Monday where I lay out what happens if Trump decides to ignore judicial orders. Spoiler: it’s not good.
