Elon Musk is gone, but DOGE still filled with his current and former employees

Boston Globe

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At least 38 DOGE members currently work or have worked for businesses run by Musk, ProPublica found in an examination of their resumes and other records. At least nine have invested in Musk companies or own stock in them, a review of available financial disclosure forms shows.
ProPublica found that at least 23 DOGE officials are making cuts at federal agencies that regulate the industries that employed them, potentially posing significant conflicts of interest. One DOGE member tasked with overseeing mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, did so
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At least 12 remain, on paper, employees or advisers of the companies they worked at before DOGE, a review of financial disclosure forms shows. And at least nine continue to receive corporate benefits from their private-sector employers, including health insurance, stock vesting plans or retirement savings programs. These employment agreements could create a situation in which a DOGE staffer would be shaping federal policies that affect their employer.
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The people behind DOGE are largely men in their 20s and 30s, most of whom bring no government experience to the task. Many of them previously worked in finance.
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ProPublica's list — the largest of its kind by any news organization — allows readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of the people assigned to one of the Trump administration's signature efforts. It comes at a crucial moment, as some of the first-generation DOGE members are leaving the government and a new crop is joining.
'Even though Elon Musk and some of his top officials are shifting their attention to other issues, I see no indication that the DOGE team members who remain will slow down their work to test the legal and ethical boundaries of using technology in the name of improving government services,' said Elizabeth Laird, a director at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology.
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Many of its staffers have deleted their public profiles, have wiped the internet of their professional backgrounds or were encouraged by leadership not to discuss their work with friends. At the behest of the Trump administration, the Supreme Court
To cast a light on this secretive group, ProPublica began reporting in February on Musk's influence inside the Trump administration,
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Today, we are adding 23 staffers to our tracker,
And we are revealing the makeup of the DOGE team at the Defense Department, a group made up primarily of tech startup founders. They are led by former Special Forces soldier turned tech entrepreneur Yinon Weiss, according to a former senior Pentagon official familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Weiss has repeatedly appeared on Fox News pushing the U.S. to do more to support Israeli military operations in Gaza. He did not respond to a request for comment.
A White House official praised DOGE in an interview, saying that 'bringing people in from the outside is precisely what this federal government needed after decades of stagnant bureaucrats who allowed the status quo to continue while the American people got screwed.'
The White House official said there is 'no need' for the public to know who's in DOGE and asserted that there have been no conflict-of-interest violations.
'For decades, we've been able to operate without these people's names,' the official said. 'There's no need to know the palace intrigue of who's working in the building.'
Musk has defended DOGE's work as 'common sense' and 'not draconian or radical.' He did not respond to requests for comment.
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Musk's retreat from Washington comes after his electric vehicle company Tesla sputtered amid economic turmoil — caused by a mixture of his own
How that fissure affects DOGE is yet to be seen, but the White House has already requested $45 million in funding for the group's operations
One of Musk's top DOGE lieutenants,
Questioned results
Whether DOGE has accomplished its mission — to downsize the federal bureaucracy into a more streamlined and effective workforce — is far from clear.
Musk initially said the initiative would save taxpayers $2 trillion. He later amended that figure, suggesting in April that DOGE would cut $150 billion from the national debt this year. The $180 billion in savings that
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Still, DOGE has fired tens of thousands of federal workers and
To compile our list, ProPublica tracked the industries where DOGE employees previously worked. We looked at the professional experience they brought to government and whether their assignments in DOGE could pose conflicts of interest. ProPublica pored through archived resumes, federal financial disclosures forms, online databases and other documents. We interviewed more than two dozen federal workers, some of whom shared internal agency emails, calendar invites and other material mapping DOGE's activities. We sought comment from everyone listed in our tracker. Most declined our requests.
With DOGE entering a post-Musk chapter, here are our core findings:
Potential conflicts of interest are increasing.
One 25-year-old software engineer helped DOGE shrink the agency's staff even after he was
These and other instances of DOGE staffers overseeing government operations that
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The administration has made assessing such financial arrangements difficult. So far, federal agencies have released only
DOGE's image as a group of computer engineers isn't quite right.
The DOGE 100-plus come from a variety of professions: 29 were executive managers, 28 were engineers, 16 were investors and 12 came from legal backgrounds. A scattered few others previously worked in cybersecurity, design and science.
More staffers come from finance backgrounds than any other area. Private equity investor Michael Cole, the founder of Shareholder Capital LLC, has worked at the Department of Agriculture, for example. Cole did not respond to a request for comment.
DOGE staffers are mostly young men with limited government experience.
Under Trump and Musk, DOGE has become a largely male entity. Of the 109 staff members ProPublica has identified, 90 are men and 19 are women, making the group 83% male. That's a far higher percentage of men than work in the executive branch as a whole, where 54% of staffers are male, according to 2024 data from the Office of Personnel Management.
Many are young and inexperienced. More than 60% of the DOGE staffers are in their 20s or 30s. One was 19 when he joined. As a percentage, the number of staffers under 30 in DOGE is about three times as high as in the executive branch as a whole.
Of staffers for whom ProPublica has identified ages, 28 are 29 or younger, 35 are 30 to 39, and 36 are 40 or older. The oldest is 67.
Few had experience working in state or federal government. ProPublica identified 21 DOGE staffers with previous government roles, including stints at the DOJ and NASA. That means more than 80% joined the government dismantling effort without previously working in government.
Those staffers continue to fire longtime federal employees, cut budgets and choke off government programs while protected by an administration that has pushed to keep their maneuverings out of the public spotlight.
DOGE's secrecy has been part of its overall strategy, some experts believe, allowing it to obscure its work from government watchdogs and the courts.
'It's harder to stop what they're doing if you don't know what they're doing or who's doing it,' said Faith Williams, director of the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. 'It's not inherently a bad thing these people come from outside the government. It's that they lack any experience in the methods used to uncover waste and inefficiency.'