Teen nicknamed 'Big Balls' leaves Trump's cost-cutting team after exposing wasteful spending

Fox News

25-06-2025

A White House official confirmed to Fox News that a teenaged employee with the nickname "Big Balls" has resigned from his post at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), adding to the recent shakeup within the department.
The now-former DOGE employee – whose real name is Edward Coristine – told Fox News Anchor Jesse Watters last month that his nickname originally came from his LinkedIn social media account.
"I use it as my LinkedIn username," Coristine told Watters, prompting laughter from the host as well as DOGE leader Elon Musk and the rest of his team at the interview.
"Well, people on LinkedIn take themselves super seriously, and they're pretty averse to risk, and I was like, 'Well, I want to be neither of those things.' So, I just, I set it and honestly, I didn't think anybody would notice," the DOGE employee continued, mocking the career-focused social media platform.
A 19-year-old college student and software developer, Coristine was criticized by Democrats and liberal media pundits during DOGE's first few weeks of investigating wasteful and fraudulent spending in the federal government. Many were upset about the young, irreverently named government employee being given access to government records to pursue DOGE's work.
During his interview with Watters, Coristine said he had been looking through U.S. Treasury Department payment computers and finding a multitude of outgoing payments from the federal government that lacked details about who they were going to and why.
"So, one of our initiatives is to root out fraud and waste, and to do that we started looking at the payment computers. And, as mentioned earlier, there's no accounting of what payments actually go to in the payment computer," Coristine said. "You look at a specific line item — $20 million. You're like, 'OK, what is this money going to?' And for the majority of payment systems, it's like, 'Well, we don't really know.'"
He continued, saying the system that distributes taxpayer money "literally has no checks and no accountability" to the American taxpayer, adding that it is a "huge vector for fraud, waste, and abuse."
Coristine's resignation comes less than a month after Musk departed from the agency.
Musk's departure was followed by the departure of several other staffers and special government employees at DOGE, which now includes Coristine.
Musk has been heading DOGE since President Donald Trump took office in January. The department was tasked with cutting $2 trillion from the federal government's budget through efforts to slash spending, government programs and federal workforce.
While DOGE was tasked with cutting $2 trillion from the budget, its efforts have led to roughly $180 billion in savings due to asset sales, contract cancellations, fraud payment cuts and other ways to eliminate costs, according to an update on DOGE's website.
The savings translate to about $1,118 in savings per taxpayer, the website notes.