Who is Amy Gleason? DOGE administrator named by White House — but Elon Musk is still in charge

Independent

26-02-2025

When the White House abruptly named her the administrator for an agency wreaking havoc across the federal government, Amy Gleason was in Mexico.
After weeks of secrecy in court and refusals from the White House to answer who, exactly, is running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, reporters were sent a message on February 25 from an unnamed White House spokesperson naming Gleason in the role.
Reporters then received a follow-up message to clarify that Gleason is 'acting' administrator of the agency, formerly known as the United States Digital Service.
After his inauguration, Donald Trump swiftly renamed the agency the 'U.S. DOGE Service' and declared that Elon Musk would be running it.
The Trump administration is facing an avalanche of lawsuits alleging the president and Musk are unconstitutionally running roughshod through federal agencies.
But the breakneck effort to keep up with the administration's actions in court has been met with what appears to be a rapid attempt among administration officials and government lawyers to obfuscate the true nature of Musk's role — or to scramble to name someone else in charge — while the White House accuses the press of hysterically obsessing over DOGE leadership.
The 53-year-old former healthcare worker was not aware that her sudden promotion had been announced. She was on leave in Mexico at the time.
Nearly two dozen DOGE staff who submitted a resignation letter to White House chief of staff Susan Wiles that same day said nobody in the agency had ever been notified who was running it, so they sent their letter to Wiles instead.
Administration officials have insisted that Musk is not the administrator for DOGE. Trump, however, has said the exact opposite.
Musk is merely an employee of the White House, serving as a 'senior adviser to the president,' who has 'no greater authority other than other senior White House advisers [have], and has 'no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,' according to a sworn statement from a senior White House official on February 18.
The billionaire is 'not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator,' nor is he even an employee of the agency, according to the statement from White House Office of Administration director Joshua Fisher.
White House officials previously labeled Musk a 'special government employee.'
Last week, a judge in a separate case said DOGE appears to be trying to 'escape' the 'obligations that accompany agencyhood' — including being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act — 'while reaping only its benefits.'
In court documents, government lawyers have recognized that the unnamed 'U.S. DOGE administrator' is embroiled in lawsuits targeting the Trump administration.
After the White House elevated her to that role, Gleason is likely to end up in the crosshairs of that tidal wave of litigation.
'Elon Musk is wielding extraordinarily broad and unprecedented power in leading DOGE without constitutional authority,' according to Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, which is representing a group of 17 federal employees suing the administration to block Musk's rampage.
'Our government has rules to protect the American people from executive overreach,' he added 'An unelected, part-time 'special government employee' cannot legally circumvent them. We can and will achieve accountability through the courts.'
One former USDS worker who resigned after nearly two years with the agency said the mass firings of DOGE staffers were 'shortsighted, ill-informed, and indiscriminate,' and that 'the government and the American people will be worse off from the loss of these people.'
Gleason did not respond to The Independent 's request for comment.
Gleason, who appears to live in Tennessee, previously worked as a 'digital services expert' with the U.S. Digital Service from October 2018 to December 2021.
She returned to the agency — which was created in 2014 as something of a low-profile, government-wide information technology department — after Trump's inauguration.
Gleason still lists her current role as a 'senior advisor' for the U.S. Digital Service on her LinkedIn profile.
Before returning to the agency earlier this year, she was a 'chief product officer' at two Nashville-based healthcare-related companies, Russell Street Ventures and Main Street Health.
Both companies were founded by Brad Smith — who worked in the first Trump administration and joined the transition team's early DOGE efforts with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Russell Street Ventures' website was recently taken offline, but an archived version shows that the company described itself as 'an innovative healthcare firm focused on launching and scaling companies that serve some of the nation's most vulnerable and underserved patient populations.'
'There are so many ways that our nation's healthcare system can be improved, and I am excited for the ways our team will be able to help drive that change,' Smith said in 2021, when the company was launched.
The Independent also has requested comment from Russell Street and Main Street firms.
An archived version of Gleason's company profile on the Main Street Health website says she 'spearheaded technology efforts for the federal COVID-19 response' and worked on projects with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In a podcast interview with Reveal in 2023, Gleason discussed the bureaucratic and technical hurdles to capture urgent federal health data throughout the COVID-19 crisis, fueling her work in creating the HHS Protect tracker.
She would have been familiar with that work as the co-founder and chief operating officer of health data firm CareSync, which was inspired by her attempts to collect her daughter's electronic medical records.
Gleason's personal blog, which was also taken offline this week, was last updated in 2019.
In her blog, she discusses her daughter's diagnosis with a rare autoimmune disease as well as her own health struggles. From 2014 to 2018, Gleason served as vice president for research at the Cure JM Foundation, which advocates for research, education and funding for juvenile dermatomyositis treatments.
It was CareSync's success that led President Barack Obama to name her a White House 'Champion of Change' for Precision Medicine who 'draws on these experiences to help patients and their families better coordinate care and improve health outcomes.'
'My challenge to our entire health care system, and especially the innovators looking to make it better: Put the patient in the center,' she said at the time.
She described the news of her daughter's diagnosis as the 'most terrifying day of my life' and said her experience sparked a passion for 'individualized care.'
'Break up the silos of information that prevent individualized medicine to take root and grow into something beautiful,' she said at the time. 'Combine the data, all of it, including genetics, medical records information, patient-generated data, with the collaborative, innovative minds of Americans who will create amazing discoveries to improve healthcare.'
While working with U.S. Digital Service and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2020, Gleason hosted a TEDx Talk, outlining a pilot project for streamlining health data after providers 'failed' her daughter by missing her diagnosis.
She encouraged private sector data and health workers to enlist in public service.
'Nobody else is coming,' she said. 'It's up to us to solve these problems.'
One day after refusing to give reporters the name of the public official running DOGE, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Gleason 'has been the DOGE administrator for quite some time.'
'I believe several weeks. Maybe a month,' she said on February 26. 'I'm not sure of the exact timeline. She's a career official. She's doing her job as the administrator of this organization. I know everybody's very interested in her name, and who she is and what she does — there's a lot of people who work for the federal government. They're just trying to do their jobs and, you know, that's what she's doing.'
She said the White House told reporters the name of the DOGE administrator 'in the effort of transparency' to satisfy 'hounds in the media' who are 'so obsessed with this for some reason.'
'There are so many bigger things in the world than who the DOGE administrator is, but for some reason, everybody in the press corps is so obsessed with this, that you were incessantly asking, so we thought, OK, we will be transparent, so now you know who it is,' she said.
As acting administrator of DOGE, Gleason reports to the White House chief of staff and must be 'dedicated to advancing the President's 18-month DOGE agenda,' according to the president's executive order creating the agency.
DOGE is 'modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,' according to the order.
The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization is designed to dissolve July 4, 2026.