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Most Americans know very little about Elon Musk’s team of brainiacs at the Department of Government Efficiency, and may have misconceptions about who they are.
However, Bret Baier’s interview with Musk and seven of his lieutenants at DOGE last week shed a welcome light on these unfamiliar names.
For starters, they look nothing like the image that has taken hold in the public imagination, driven by a story in Wired about a group of pimply teenage nerds with online nicknames like “Big Balls” running riot through government systems.
Instead, we saw seven highly accomplished, respectable adults, all but one in a suit and tie. They are friends of Musk that he has tapped as “tech support” for the federal government, at least for the 130 days he has committed himself to.
Some work in his companies. At least one is a self-made billionaire in his own right. The last thing they need is a federal government job. They don’t speak like partisan activists but like the successful engineers and businesspeople they are. They may well be Democrats, like Musk once was, but you wouldn’t know it, and nor should it matter.
They have volunteered to fix the antiquated computer systems and operations of the federal government and safeguard them from fraud and waste because, like Musk, they believe America is in dire need of their expertise and can-do energy.
‘Best of Silicon Valley’
These are the seven Musketeers:
Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb and a close friend of Musk, has volunteered at DOGE to modernize the retirement process for federal government employees, contributing what he calls his “designer brain and start-up spirit.”
“I loved the challenge, so I jumped on board,” he told Baier. “We’re taking the best of Silicon Valley and the business world and bringing it into the government . . . I’m here because it’s an interesting problem. We can use design and good engineering to solve it and really create a better experience for everybody.”
He described an underground mine in Pennsylvania that “houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government” and hasn’t changed in 70 years. He plans to digitize the mess of 400 million pieces of paper in 22,000 filing cabinets and create an “Apple Store–like experience” for government services.
Steve Davis, an aerospace engineer, is Musk’s top lieutenant from Space X and most recently ran Musk’s Boring Company, the tunnel-digging startup. He is the head of operations for DOGE.
“To have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing,” he says. He and the others have “put our lives on hold [because] we believe there is a chance to succeed.”
Among DOGE’s discoveries are 15 million people aged over 120 marked as “alive” in the Social Security system. “Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions.” There also are 4.6 million credit cards in the federal government for some 2.4 million employees.
Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley CEO who has been in Musk’s orbit for 15 years, joined DOGE in January to apply “public company standards to the federal government.”
He told Baier it was “ alarming” to find “only one bank account that’s used to disburse all monies that go out of the federal government.”
“There’s $500 billion of fraud every year and hundreds of billions of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit,” he said. “We’re serving 580-plus agencies and up until very recently, effectively they could say ‘make the payment’ and Treasury just sent it out as fast as possible, no verification.”
He signed up to a stint of thankless toil at DOGE because “I’m blessed with four beautiful children, my wife and I, but we have a real fiscal crisis, and this is not sustainable. What’s worse, back to my children and everyone else’s children, is we are burdening them with debt, and it’s only going to grow.”
Fixing the system
Aram Moghaddassi is a young Silicon Valley software engineer who works for Musk’s company Neuralink.
“I thought I’m a software engineer who could maybe make a difference here,” he says of his work with DOGE.
He is embedded in the Social Security Administration, where the computer systems are over 50 years old and vulnerable to fraud. He aims to make two improvements for Social Security beneficiaries: “Protect them from fraud . . . and make the experience better.”
Forty percent of the calls to Social Security are from fraudsters trying to steal retirees’ money, he says.
Brad Smith, a Nashville-based Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, is a health-care entrepreneur.
He told Baier his aim was to make “700 different IT systems at NIH . . . speak to each other.”
He also wants researchers to receive 85% of federal grant money rather than the current 60 percent, with the rest going to their universities.
Anthony Armstrong is a former Morgan Stanley tech banker who helped orchestrate Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (now X). He serves as a senior adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human-resources department.
His focus is on shrinking the federal workforce by targeting “duplicative functions” and wasteful spending.
As an example, he points to “1400 people at the IRS whose job is just to hand out laptops and cellphones to staff.”
Tyler Hassen is a Texas energy company executive who dropped everything to join DOGE because he feels it is his patriotic duty.
“I was running five businesses in Houston,” he said, “and I left that . . . to do this, and my wonderful wife said, ‘go for it,’ and here I am . . . This is me giving back to the country.”
He is embedded in the Department of the Interior, where he says, “Under the Biden administration, there was no departmental oversight whatsoever.”
He waved a piece of paper in the interview, a $905 million contract for a customer service survey so simple “I could have done in high school.” After DOGE’s intervention, the contract was canceled, saving all but $75 million, one of the many taxpayer savings that activist federal judges have tried to block.
‘Tech support’’
For the world’s richest man, the abuse he has endured since he joined forces with Trump and devoted himself to the Department of Government Efficiency seems only to have strengthened his resolve.
“The reason we’re doing this is because if we don’t do this, America is going to go . . . bankrupt,” Musk said.
The changes DOGE is making will “allow the federal government to pass an audit and enable taxpayers to know where their money is going [and] that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.”
“When I say our job is tech support, I really mean it,” he added. “What we have here is a bunch of failing computer systems . . . preventing people from receiving their benefits, preventing research from happening, [and] that are extremely vulnerable to fraud. We’re fixing it.”
In an era when public service is too often associated with self-interest and partisan political games, it is heartening to see people working hard for the American people in consequential ways for what appear to be genuinely altruistic reasons.