Elon Musk and his now 100 person strong gang of Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutters are stripping the federal government of waste.
While some Americans are up in arms at the sudden upheaval, others express gratitude for Musk and his crew getting under the hood to cut through federal bureaucracy and bring the way it runs into the 21st century.
Solidly in the latter camp: Steve Daines, a republican senator from Montana, who stated on CNBC, “I thank God everyday for President Trump’s leadership, what Elon Musk is doing and his team.”
Recently announced to be in the DOGE line of fire: a converted former limestone mine where thousands of pages of retirement paperwork are still sorted by hand. Musk trashed it for being a “time warp.”
While Musk functions as the head of the operation – proceeding in a manner that echoes the early days of the tech billionaire’s employee-axing $14 billion Twitter takeover – his right-hand people do much of the heavy lifting in crushing government funded organizations and departments viewed as unnecessary and wasteful.
The DOGE-bros – the first 12 were referred to by President Trump as “geniuses” – are a corps comprised largely of twentysomething techies, some of whom dropped out of college, who see themselves on a mission to make America’s finances great again – even though federal government mass firing victims (who got months of severance) wish they would all go back to Silicon Valley. However, Musk shows no interest in leaving or slowing things down.
Here are key members of the Musk posse:
Kendall Lindemann
Though the twentysomething Lindemann did not make the cut as an Olympic swimmer (the University of Tennessee grad competed in Olympic Trials), she did get recruited from a previous job at Russell Street Ventures to join DOGE. She was presumably brought on Brad Smith, head of Russell Street who is also high up in the DOGE echelon and previously worked on Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s coronavirus vaccine development program under the last Trump government.
Lindemann is public about her religious beliefs and married to University of Texas alumni Reid Lindemann, who works as a software engineer.
Luke Farritor
Wired reported that Farritor, 23, is one of four DOGE staffers operating out of the General Services Administration’s top floor with free run of the place and access to its computer systems.
He has previously worked as a SpaceX intern and snagged a fellowship with billionaire Peter Thiel, who wrote him a $100,000 check to drop out of school and pursue his own studies. Though Farritor did not stay at University of Nebraska-Lincoln long enough to graduate, he is not a garden variety dropout.
While there, he was part of a Grand Prize-winning team in the Vesuvius Challenge, in which they used computer technology to virtually unravel a 2,000 year old ancient Roman scroll. The scroll was a scrap of Herculaneum papyrus which had been frozen in time – burned into lava when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
Farritor and two other students were able to scan the scroll, segment it out and then search for ink, uncovering its words.
The team’s prize was $700,000, and Farritor used his portion to buy a vintage Talking Heads concert poster for his brother and wanted to take his mother to Paris, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The biggest financial backer of the Vesuvius Challenge? The Musk Foundation.
Adam Ramada
No stranger to the ways of Elon Musk, Ramada is a 35-year-old venture capitalist from Miami, who put money into a company which invested in Musk’s SpaceX rocket and satellite launching project.
Playing on the President’s side, he made a $1,000-plus donation to Republican entities, public records show.
During his time as a managing partner of Spring Tide Capital, Ramada championed the raising of $12 million to help fund ZBiotics, a company which makes a probiotic drink for partyers to ingest before alcohol, designed to help stem the effects of hangovers.
As Ramada said at the time, speaking to foodbev.com, “We are thrilled to support the team as they continue to expand their revolutionary probiotic platform across many more exciting use cases that address everyday consumer pain points.”
Kyle Schutt
If technology can be used to replace some of the people being sacked by DOGE mandates, Schutt, 37, may come in handy. Believed to be based out of Arlington, Virginia, his past job history had him working as the chief technology officer for a company called Kerplunk (a startup that focuses on interviewing-software, which streamlines the process of screening new hires).
He has a Ph.D. from Virginia tech and worked on AI for Kerplunk, which may have made him the perfect candidate for gaining access to the core management system of FEMA, where, according to a report, he had “been embedded for days.” According to Newsweek, he helped launch fundraising platform WinRed, which played a role in raising $1.8 billion for the Republican party.
Gavin Kliger
Though only 25, Kliger already appears to be in charge of some big decisions when it comes to personnel. According to reports, it was his email account which sent a mass email to all USAid workers telling them their Washington DC office was closed on Feb. 3, and they were all put on administrative leave. USAid has now been taken off the lease of the building and its signage taken down, although the fate of many of its staff will play out in the courts.
Now, perhaps, consultants of the Internal Revenue Service should be concerned. On Thursday, Kliger was reported to be speaking with top IRS executives to single out contracts which should be canceled.
Meanwhile Kliger has been accused of trolling fans by requesting $1,000 payments from those who want to read about why he joined DOGE, however the link he sent back only led to a blank page.
Kliger was as student at University of California Berkely until 2022. According to Wired, he previously worked for the AI company Databricks, which helps clients to develop artificial intelligence.
Marko Elez
At the tender age of 25, Rutgers University graduate Elez already has an impressive resume, working for Musk’s X platform and SpaceX.
Now he has been granted access to highly sensitive systems within the Treasury Department involved with facilitating government payments worth trillions of dollars per year.
As a member of the DOGE team, he was granted access to systems within the Treasury Department that are involved with facilitating government payments. According to Wired Elez was supped to have “read only” access and somehow wound up with the ability to write code on sensitive systems.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the DOGE team’s work saying: “This is not some roving band … This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings,” on Bloomberg TV last week.
If that did not make large enough waves, there were his deleted social media accounts with allegedly racist comments. In one, the account allegedly posted, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
He voluntarily resigned in the wake of controversy stirred up by the comments. However, after Vice President JD Vance said “stupid social media activity” should not “ruin a kid’s life,” Musk confirmed he was to be reinstated.
Edward Coristine
Coristine, known by the online handle Big Balls, graduated high school and may or may be attending Northeastern University. At the tender age of 19, and ranking among the youngest members of Musk’s crew, he already put in three months on staff at Neuralink.
That is Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company, which is devising ways to monitor and enhance brain activity. According to Wired, Musk views Coristine as being sharp enough to judge computer code written by employees of the General Services Administration.
As per the Washington Post, Big Balls is also functioning as a senior advisor to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. However, he does have a worrying incident in his past, where a cybersecurity company he worked for said it fired him in 2022 for leaking sensitive data, according to Bloomberg News, a charge he has denied.
